


Dark Corners, Sharp Angles (Year One)

by biodigitaljazz



Series: Improvidence [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: A Lot Of Them Actually, Attempted Kismesistude, Classic Teenage Confusion Made Worse By Cultural/Species Differences, M/M, Not Totally Canon, Pale Cuddling, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Post-Scratch, Quadrant Confusion, Quadrant Vacillation, Underage Makeouts, on the meteor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-15 08:39:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 34,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/847511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biodigitaljazz/pseuds/biodigitaljazz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Karkat Vantas.</p>
<p>Your life is unnecessarily complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My first tiptoeing little steps into Homestuck territory. 
> 
> This'll be a multiple-chapter excursion, which I will try to keep updated as consistently as I can.
> 
> * * *

Your name is Karkat Vantas.

Your life is unnecessarily complicated.

You vaguely and distantly remember a time when acceptance used to be a little easier, back before everything completely went to shit. Hell, the hardest thing you’ve ever had to accept and face up until now was the death of your Lusus, and even _that_ was easier to cope with than this. You aren’t sure how you’ve been keeping it together, honestly. Somewhere deep down you really fucking hate to admit it, but you’re starting to think that having the humans around makes everything marginally more tolerable. To a certain degree, anyway. Maybe it’s their naivety – they’ve gone through a lot already, but it’ll take sweeps on top of sweeps on top of sweeps to even measure up to all of the bullshit that you and your like-specied comrades have had to wade through. The humans still have a spark in them, a really weird sort of innocence that keeps them held together when everything around them is trying desperately to fray their edges. You gather that it’ll probably happen eventually, but for now, keeping an eye on them and watching them as they continue to act like things might _still be okay_ someday, maybe even someday soon, is like breathing in a little bit of fresh air. …when you’re not in a particularly sour disposition and wishing them straight into their graves, at least.

Lately a lot of what you feel is dangerously reliant on your mood. And lately, your mood has been pretty fucking wretched.

You tried blaming it on a sort of cabin fever. You tried telling yourself over and over, like a mantra, that this is ALL the meteor’s fault because you miss plant life and grass and familiarity, and you’ve come to loathe the stagnant, musty smell of pretty much every single room you’ve been in, and you miss your stupid hive like you wouldn’t believe and somehow along that train of thought you spiral straight into _really_ missing your Lusus. It’s the worst, when he comes to mind unexpectedly. And there’s only so much you can do to distract yourself from the endlessly vast size of the rock you’re stuck on, and from the fact that most of your friends are now dead, and from the fact that the only one you still genuinely feel like you can even partially connect to goes missing for days at a time.

To practically everyone else, he’s been missing for the entirety of the trip, and that’s been… totally fine by them. Even after shit seemed to calm down, his presence was fucking unnerving, and everyone seemed to struggle to get past what he did, what that _stupid crazy asshole fucking did_. You know for a fact that if Kanaya caught him lurking around, she’d likely want to take care of him all by herself with her own bare hands. Can’t blame her for that. Can’t blame anyone for what they feel anymore, even while you’re trying to.

Since the murders, you’d had a really hard time figuring out why you’re so needlessly worried about him. Eventually, you stopped trying to figure it out, or explain it to anyone. You stopped bringing him up and whenever someone else did, you kept the topic as short and clipped as you could. You’d think that after everything, you may have hardened up a little more, right? Of course not. Somehow, in some ass-backwards way, it only made you soft. Vulnerable.

You’ve mulled over this for awhile. You’ve had all the time in the world to do so. You’ve been through all of the self-loathing and the uncontrollable anger issues and the overwhelming, massive waves of sadness that seemed to blindside you out of the clear fucking blue (or black, as it were, seeing as you’re currently traveling through _absolutely fucking nothing_ ); once all of that started to ebb off and you felt yourself adapting to your problems instead of barely managing to cope with them, you were able to sit down and rationally surmise that this all must be your equivalent to post-traumatic stress. There’s really no other fucking explanation, is there?

You can honestly say that when everything went down, when you were dragging the bleeding, broken, useless bag of bones that Sollux calls a body deeper into the lab, you have never, _never_ been more genuinely fucking afraid of anything in your life.

And you _never_ want to feel fear that ice-cold and suffocating again. This encounter with it has scarred you in places you didn’t even know existed.

Cutting yourself off from everyone else for the majority of your time HAS had its benefits, though, however twisted and pathetic they might be. Kanaya and Terezi (especially Terezi, _fuck_ ) have both been really hard to talk to lately, and while you CAN tolerate Dave’s presence to a certain degree now, you always reach a point when he starts to grate your already delicate, nearly shattered nerves with his mumbling and his scribbling.

Now that you’ve made excuses not to spend time socializing with the other sorry sacks that are stuck here with you for who knows how much longer, you’ve been able to take up talking to the vents.

So far, nobody’s caught you, you don’t think.

You can tell when he needs to talk (if you wanted to be strictly literal, it’s really not so much ‘talk’ as it is ‘say something’; it’s been awhile since you’ve actually TALKED and carried on some sort of conversation that lasted longer than ten or twenty seconds) by paying attention. You’ve guessed that so far nobody else has noticed – or admitted to noticing – the noises that drift through the multiple scattered ventilation grates. The only reason YOU know to listen for it is because you mentally trained yourself to. You noticed it on an accidental whim the first time; the noise scared the absolute shit out of you and almost made you throw up just by association alone. But since then, you’ve known to keep a sharp ear open for it. And since then, the noise stopped making you feel nauseous. It sounds so, so fucked up, but it’s actually started to make you remember better times, when all people needed to worry about was being toolbags to a bunch of fucktarded human kids over a messaging system, and how loud you were going to be that day.

It makes you remember him. Before all this.

\- - -

You’re stopped dead in your tracks on your way down one of the fourteen fucking million twisting hallways that somehow you’ve managed to at least partially memorize. The sound is always way too quiet at first, feels like your mind is playing some sort of nasty trick on you. You have no idea if it’s him being tentative, or if he starts trying to catch your attention way too soon, when he’s not close enough to the grates yet. This time, though, you are absolutely sure from the fucking start that you heard it, and it wasn’t your imagination.

You’re trying not to be instantly pissed. The asshole’s been doing whatever the fuck it is that he does and hasn’t bothered to make his presence known in the past couple of days. You don’t like worrying to begin with, but worrying about him _really_ knots up your stomach.

You turn toward the nearest vent and you stop moving, still as possible, waiting for the telltale second signal. When it comes, it’s abrupt and you jump a little; not because you’re scared. Just startled. It IS a very intrusive and unexpected sound, after all. Sometimes it’s like the asshole makes a fucking game of it, switching between vents that are too close to one another and YOU’RE the dipshit who needs to figure out which one to talk at.

Not this time. He is being very straight forward with you, and you can tell he isn’t fucking around. He’s being as serious as he can while wielding a fucking stupid, doofy horn.

You move closer, check your surroundings to confirm your solitude, sink down onto your hands and knees in front of the grated opening and squint hard to try and see inside. You don’t see much at first, just black, but then the black shifts and you realize you’ve been staring into a black mop of matted hair. His head lifts, and you see his eyes.

You shift back a little. Again, not scared. Just jumpy. Lately you’re always fucking jumpy. And even though the horn really doesn’t freak you out the way it used to and the way you thought it would for the rest of your miserable life, his eyes are still a little unsettling. Still a muddy, light kind of amber (they always seemed a little darker than everyone else’s; you’ve always chalked it up to some kind of reaction to the shit he kept packing into his system or whatever, you had no idea) and still half-lidded but not like they were before. Not like when he was completely blazed off of his stash of garbage and mellowed out. There’s something eerie about it. You feel like someone as sober as he is now shouldn’t be wearing an expression like that.

His eyes look tired but that doesn’t seem to be affecting him much. You wonder offhandedly how long it’s been since _he’s_ fucking slept, and the idea of him being awake at all hours, creeping through everyone’s walls and ceilings while they manage to get some sleep, is more unnerving than the steady eye contact that you are now maintaining with him.

For a minute, neither of you say anything. You just stare at each other. It’s not common for him to get this close to the openings of the vents, close enough to actually see details of his face.

“Gamzee,” you finally croak out and your voice sounds like you haven’t used it in days.

He doesn’t move, just blinks slowly. To anyone else, he probably looks absolutely fucking horrifying right now, just these creepy, lazy looking eyes the colour of stale piss, one of which having barely escaped getting gouged out and as a result graced just over and under with a thick, ugly scar. But you see deeper than that. You see deeper than the unfaltering gaze and all of the screws coming loose behind them. You see past the fact that he’s been communicating with you through a _fucking ventilation system_ because everyone he knows wants to kill him and he apparently has better things to worry about than trying to dodge a deathblow out in the open. He’s insane, he’s got blood in every colour of the fucking spectrum on his hands, and he doesn’t act like he could give two shits less, but you know that’s not ALL there is to him. He’s your moirail, for fuck’s sake. You’re _supposed_ to know him better than anyone else, even if you don’t understand him.

“I haven’t seen you in _days_ , you shit.”

You say it without venom.

He gets that.

You scoot a little closer to the vent again, after another quick look-around. Your temper is threatening to bubble up and you’re really making an effort NOT to give in to it because he’s Gamzee and he looks fucking pathetic to you right now, trapped in his dark little prison, alone. Something about him is off, too, you could sense that as soon as you approached him.

You give yourself a beat or two to wrangle your anger back down.

“What’s going on?” you finally ask him, keeping your voice quiet and level.

He makes a gesture that you can just barely make out, a quick jerk of the head and his eyes sliding toward the same direction. He meets your gaze again but only for a second, because then he’s gone, disappeared back into the shadows, moving.

He wants you to follow him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You’re not sure what to say or ask, because you still have that tower of questions looming just behind your teeth, but you sense that maybe he’s in an awkwardly delicate place right now so you opt against letting any of those questions loose.
> 
> You decide to go with only one. “Why did you bring me here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Servin up some moirail realness.
> 
> Also, I got Kudos!? Thanks, guys!
> 
> * * *

You don’t know what you’re expecting.

In a very small way, it’s kind of exciting. In a much _larger way_ , the uncertainty is almost immobilizing.

But you move. You move with him because if he’s breaking away from the usual voice-to-vent system that you’ve set up, it must be important. He leads you the only way he knows how to – grate by grate with that stupid fucking horn of his – and you follow like a bat with sonar. The noises are so soft, but your ears know. Your ears know, and they catch them.

He’s not stupid, though, and whenever you pass by a bigger, brighter area, he calms it down. You didn’t think you would, but you actually do have an encounter with someone on your way to wherever-the-fuck, Rose, but you barely (wisely) acknowledge her. In the moment you glance up just to see who it is, you catch that she may have possibly been just about to stop or question you, but has thought against it. Good. You are not in any position (with your mood OR your time) to explain yourself. If you bump into her later and she brings it up again, you know how to successfully brush things aside without surrendering any details. You can be the kind of aloof asshole that is _specifically_ trained to avoid talking about shit that you do NOT want to talk about, and you feel proud in the assumption that it didn’t take very long for any of the newcomers to learn that about you. You ARE the one with the claws and the sharp teeth, and you are not hesitant to remind anyone of it, either.

He leads you, your rapidly waning patience, and your escalating anxiety to a dark corner that you hadn’t discovered or explored yet, and you notice almost instantly that the grating here is much bigger than the other twelve-by-nine vents all over the place. This one is at least a couple of feet wide and tall, and the already rusted metal along the outer rims and corners of it are scratched to hell. The bolts holding the grate to the wall are just as bad.

So this is how the fucker got in there.

Now is the part, you guess, where you wait. The noises have stopped and now nothing is happening. This is typical of your life – just standing here looking at a rusty, beat-up air duct and wondering what the fuck the crazy clown hiding in there has up his sleeve. Or if he’s going to let you in, or what.

Finally, just as the thought of maybe turning away and leaving is _starting_ to enter the atmosphere of your mind, there’s movement between the big vent’s metal grates and you suddenly can’t think about or look at anything else. There’s a small, extremely dim patch of light down there, just beyond what seems like a long strip of pitch black.

The voice that follows the movement is just as hoarse as yours was when you first opened your mouth. It floats toward you from somewhere that you can’t decipher, and it’s very quiet.

“It pulls away.”

Ah.

You move in and lift your hands, sliding your fingers in between the bars and giving the grate a hefty tug. It comes away from the wall with the slightest bit of resistance and you gape like a fucking moron at the opening you just created for a second before leaning the slab of bars against the wall beside the hole and tentatively peering in.

It occurs to you that you’re starting to climb into what has been the hiding place of the deranged lunatic who murdered all of your friends like he was just swatting flies. The deranged lunatic who was careful enough to set the cover up looking like it was totally rusted shut, when all you had to do was pull a little to get it open. Smart. Smart, and that’s what’s creepy about it.

You try not to think about it anymore.

It is horribly claustrophobic. You fit, but not by much; anyone larger in frame or build than you would probably be struggling. The only reason you’re struggling is because you really do not know what the fuck you are getting yourself into, or what you’re going to be facing when you’re done here, and you feel like the walls around you are getting more and more narrow or is that just your paranoid imagination?

The only thing keeping you from panicking and backing right the fuck out is the little patch of dim light. It’s getting bigger and closer (but unfortunately, not brighter) with each crawl and uncomfortable wriggle forward.

He’s never done this before. If you reject the opportunity, he may never extend the offer again.

After what seems like hours of forcing your way through the too-narrow tunnel of metal, you’re at the opening on the other side and you’re shocked to find that it actually opens directly into a room. It’s filthy and it’s hard to see too clearly, but you can make out other narrow passages dipping into every single wall in random places, like little labyrinthine pathways. Most of the room is metal, save for the concrete and plaster and dirt that make up the walls and floor. The place _looks_ like its stench must be incredibly foul, especially because the air has warmed significantly, but really it’s just musky with slight metallic undertones. Old pipes and small grates that are _actually_ rusted shut litter the walls and even the floor but they’re so dirty and beaten up and old that you can only assume that Gamzee hasn’t been using them for anything.

You make a very unceremonious and very clumsy exit from the duct you just crawled through by pulling yourself as forward as possible and kind of… slipping the rest of the way out like a newborn fucking grub. You’ve only been a couple of feet off of the ground but you hit your elbows pretty hard and you hiss out a curse, immediately curling yourself up into a proper sitting position and taking a moment to rub at the offended joints.

This gives you a chance to see more of the room.

There’s indiscernible garbage piling up in the right corner; it looks like he’s been trying to keep it all in one spot instead of letting it overflow anywhere else, because it’s a pretty impressively sized pile. You can see the floor more clearly and now, you can make out very distinct paths that aren’t as caked with dirt and dust as the others, leading to every single one of those narrow passageways. This must be the main room, where he can access any and every vent he wants to just by slipping off into the right direction. He must have everything _memorized_ by now, if he was able to use this system to get you to the entrance.

A sick chill runs up your spine. Way, way too fucking smart.

You rise to your feet just as you’re extending your field of vision toward the furthest left part of the room, and after noticing a dirty pile of various stuffed plush toys in the corner (shit, when and where did he even manage to get those), your attention is drawn to the figure just beside it.

He moves toward you, finally shifting his way out of the shadows to where you can see him more clearly.

This is the first time in awhile that you’ve seen more than just his eyes or parts of his face shadowed by the bars on the vents. He looks pretty fucking terrible, but has he ever really looked _good_ before? His hair is a matted mess around the base of his horns and the paint he’d always kept on his face is completely screwed with no rhyme or reason, just streaks of white with no direction or finesse. His frame is obviously the same, with his long legs and shorter torso and his long, almost spindly arms, but he is so much thinner now than he was the last time you came face to face.

You have questions for him. You want to know how he even LIVES in here, if he’s been eating, what he’s been eating, how the _mothergrubbing fuck_ he got those _fucking filthy toys_ but before you can so much as change your expression from mirroring your tentative awe into concerned anger, he’s reaching for you and then he’s crushing you against him.

He doesn’t smell so great and he’s dirty and a little damp (you are hoping from perspiration due to the stale warmth of the room) but this is probably the first time in… fuck if you know how long that you actually feel okay.

Your arms are around him before you even make the conscious decision to move.

It’s only awkward for a few seconds, but then you’re reminded so, so vividly of the last time you did this, the way he flew so far off the fucking handle that you could have sworn you’d lost him for good, and how you were literally the only thing in the multiple fucking universes and timelines that you’d ever seen or been to that could calm his shit right down. You’re reminded of how his frantic, frightening noises gradually quieted under your careful hands and how it felt to hold him afterwards, how limp and exhausted he seemed as he leaned most (but not all; fucker’s way taller than you) of his weight into you and finally let himself relax. He did that because he _trusts_ you. You’re starting to think that you’re the only one, dead OR alive, who can hold that particular torch.

And here he is again. Extending his trust to you even though the two of you have, in a strange way, sort of drifted apart over the past year.

You find it remarkable.

\- - -

You have That Moment. 

You _hate_ That Moment. When you fall asleep somehow and then when you wake up, you can’t remember for the life of you how the fuck you got where you are let alone remembering when you fell asleep.

Fortunately, this time, That Moment only lasts for literally about a moment before the near-panicked concern subsides a little and you’re left with your pulse having a shitfit in the side of your neck and the ominous dark cloud of having to deal with reality again forming above you. If you saw or did anything while you were dreaming, you don’t remember. It must have been a pretty quick snooze. You rarely ever let yourself actually slip into a deep enough sleep to really count anymore, anyway.

So, you’re in the dirty stuffed animal pile. And now you remember. The two of you were hugging it out like everything was fucking hunky dory and then he started making really weird noises in the back of his throat. Upset noises, noises that you’d only ever heard out of him one or two other times since knowing him. You had a feeling they wouldn’t escalate into something dangerous or anything like that, but you took extra precaution and led him over here to this disgusting heap of plush despite how the looks of it made your skin crawl (the room may not smell too funky, but this sure as shit does) and you soothed him down like it was what you were hatched to do. He didn’t resist at all; he actually probably really needed it. He’s been isolating himself this whole time and you can speak from experience that after too long of no contact, you start to miss it. Even just one little touch.

He fell asleep pretty fast after that, actually. And so did you.

And now you’re awake, sitting on the soft little snouts of at least three or four dirty little Scalemates, feeling groggy because you were probably _just_ teetering on the edge of deep sleep before you woke up.

You turn your head, look down at the body next to you, and he’s awake too, watching you carefully and quietly, still laying on his side with one arm crooked and tucked under his own head. You kind of just stare at one another for a few beats. You’re not sure what to say or ask, because you still have that tower of questions looming just behind your teeth, but you sense that maybe he’s in an awkwardly delicate place right now so you opt against letting any of those questions loose.

You decide to go with only one. “Why did you bring me here?”

He shifts slightly and actually smiles a little and _fuck_ , you never thought you’d ever miss that smile but you realize how much you’ve missed it because of the almost painful tug of emotion in your chest. Fucking _knock that off_ , you need to get some answers out of this shithead before you can start (figuratively) kissing and making up.

“Don’t you ever get lonely, Kar?”

You missed the stupid nickname, too. And his stupid, creepy, raspy voice.

“What.” You aren’t sure how to answer that – if you answer it honestly, you’re giving too much of yourself away. If you don’t, nobody would believe you.

He shifts again, this time rolling a little more onto his back. “ _Lonely_. I’m tellin’ a brother that I got straight up nobody here with me most of the time, gets fuckin’ boring. I ain’t had a REAL motherfuckin’ conversation in _sweeps_ , bro.”

That’s an exaggeration, but you see where he’s coming from. You don’t skeptically point it out like your gut’s telling you to. You’re just slightly queasy with relief that he seems to be somewhat back to normal and not shouting every other sentence. You really can’t help but wait, in the back of your head, for the other shoe to come flying out of nowhere, but for now you really just want to enjoy his company while it’s still drifting along in the realm of the enjoyable.

“Maybe because you slaughtered most of us and then chased me down into the fucking bowels of the lab leaving nightmarish notes for me along the way?” You just HAD to say something, didn’t you? But at least you’re saying it as gently as you possibly can.

He gets this look on his face like a puppy that’s been kicked twice as hard as it’s normally used to being kicked. You instantly regret bringing it up so early, but like fuck you’re going to apologize. You think a part of him needed to hear it, but could only handle hearing it from _you_.

“Aw, c’mon, let’s not talk about that motherfuckin’ mess right now,” he replies, and his voice is a few decibels softer than it was before. You HAVE brought it up before, way back when he first started contacting you through vents. He didn’t want to talk about it then, either, but he knows what he did and he knows the weight of it. But he obviously didn’t bring you hear to talk about killing everyone. This isn’t really an appropriate time.

Yeah, you feel bad. Funny, how this useless, crazy shitstain has that effect on you.

You sigh and fold and settle back down a little, leaning your weight on one elbow so you can keep looking at him. “Yeah,” you agree, nodding a little and tentatively reaching your free hand out, brushing your knuckles over his clothed ribcage. “Okay. We won’t talk about that.”

He instantly relaxes. He’s so much like a fucking wriggler sometimes. You only wish the innocence would stay and the hulking, black _thing_ that you know is still lurking inside of him would just fucking vanish. You like him better like this. Way better.

“Thanks, bro.”

You hum a noncommittal response and pull your hand back.

A brief silence hangs between you.

“…so. Are you fucking eating okay or what?”

He laughs.

It’s music.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s really difficult to look past what he did. You try, because his attention feels nice. He’s unhinged, and he’s crazy, and he’s probably still dangerous - even while he looks like he's thinking and speaking with more clarity than ever, you're not so easily fooled - but you can’t help but be struck by the way he looks at you, like you’re the most precious and sacred thing in his entire fucked up little universe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Dave comes a'knockin'. Or a'sittin' and a'mindin' his own business.
> 
> * * *

You find out that he’s been eating but not much; it’s hard to find food when he’s making himself this scarce. You learn that coming down off of the sopor slime and that Faygo shit he was always guzzling wasn’t as easy as everyone was telling him this whole time and it really kind of destroyed his appetite. He went through a pretty severe detox period, and he was alone throughout the entire thing. That makes you mad, actually, and you ask him why the hell he didn’t have company while he was suffering, because yeah, by his descriptions, he was most definitely suffering, no way around that. And he just kind of smiles that stupid, lopsided clown smile of his and tells you, “Shit, you don’t think a brother can handle his own?”

You don’t smile back. Because, clearly, he can’t.

You tell him as much, and he pulls the kicked puppy look again. He’s gotten really good at emoting the right way while sobering up, surprisingly, because this is the second time within, what, a twenty minute span? That he’s conjured up immediate guilt. You’re forced to apologize and this is the _second fucking time_ you’ve had to apologize to him because you feel like an asshole. Dealing with Gamzee isn’t like dealing with everyone else. You used to be able to pitch some of your most colourful and creative insults at him without even thinking twice, and he took it like a winner. You _never_ made a dent in that spacey smile of his, and he usually just responded by nudging you or squeezing your shoulder or, whenever he felt particularly bold, ruffling your hair and telling you that you were _too fuckin’ funny, brother_. He’s playing new angles, now. You’re probably going to have to adjust to feeling like the biggest bulgebag ever if you ever want to insult him again.

His response to your apology is a lazily waved hand, the same hand that reaches up and pulls you back into a laying position beside him. You’re still not used to this cuddly, snuggly shit, but you don’t want to upset him again so you ignore your discomfort and settle down on your side, mirroring his previous position with your arm tucked under your own head. He rolls onto his side, too, and for the next few minutes he’s quietly studying your face. His eyes are wondering all over it and you aren’t sure whether you’re happy that he’s regained a lot of his senses for the time being, or creeped out that he’s showing such unprovoked, intense attentiveness with you.

It’s really difficult to look past what he did. You try, because his attention feels nice. He’s unhinged, and he’s crazy, and he’s probably still dangerous - even while he looks like he's thinking and speaking with more clarity than ever, you're not so easily fooled - but you can’t help but be struck by the way he looks at you, like you’re the most precious and sacred thing in his entire fucked up little universe.

“You afraid of dying?”

The question comes unexpectedly, and you know you should probably react a little more viscerally to it but you’re too calm right now. Your defenses only rise a little; not enough to show him outright.

“That’s a fucking weird question.”

He huffs out a small breath of laughter. You both admire and fucking hate the way his eyes wrinkle at the corners when he smiles genuinely, it makes your chest hurt.

“I know, bro.”

He’s still waiting for an answer. He’s watching you patiently and expectantly.

“I guess?” you finally offer him, and lamely shrug the shoulder you’re not laying on.

He nods a little. You feel the clawed tips of his fingers idly picking at the sleeve of your shirt. He looks like he’s really rolling your response, as dull as it was, around in his head.

You know that you’re probably walking a pretty risky line right now – sure, your shooshes and your paps worked their magic when you first left, but for how long? It’s been nearly a year. Maybe a little over a year? Hard to tell, you stopped trying to figure out what fucking time or day or month it was awhile ago. It’s very possible that the effect you had on him to simmer down his shit could wear off any time. He’s so mellow and nice to be around when he’s acting like this, and watching him snap back into lunacy would probably destroy something in you that you’d never be able to revive.

“Not me,” he says, and his voice has quieted again. “Got too much in my head to motherfuckin’ worry about anything else. Gotta make sure I keep the noggin on straight, bro, with all the crazy dreams and keeping on the DL, and people screaming and motherfuckin’ babies crying and all the whispering, man, a brother can’t think about shit like that, know what I mean?”

You don’t. This is the most he’s spoken to you in weeks, maybe longer, and it’s about 70% nonsense. Guess some of that crazy couldn’t be fixed. You have no fucking idea what he’s even talking about, and you get the sense that maybe he doesn’t really, either.

“Shh, sh. I know,” you reply, because it’s probably best to derail a potential tangent before it has a chance to really start rolling. “Try not to for now, okay? Like fuck anyone’s looking for you, so you’re pretty safe down here.” You reach up and gently rub his head just behind one of his ears. You were going to stroke your fingers through his hair because he seemed to like that last time, but the curls are too tangled. “Just don’t do anything fucking stupid like resurface your face without me being there. Just in case.”

He relaxes again, practically melts, and the hand that’s been picking at your sleeve slides itself over your waist to rest just above your hip. You don’t mind. You dropped the personal space complaints with him awhile ago, when you realized that it was pretty much in one ear, out the other.

“You’re the best moirail a brother could ask for, you know? All protecting me and shit.” There’s a gentility about him right now that kills you utterly. You’re glad that this is a private thing between you two, and that nobody else can see how fucking senselessly fascinated you are by him. His smile grows a little, and it’s the first time in awhile that he’s attempted to joke around. It comes out slightly rusty, but well-intended. “Next time you visit I’m gonna have you fuckin’ _spoon feeding_ me.”

You smirk despite yourself, grabbing some of the hair under your hand and giving it a gentle tug. “Lick my bulge twice, you creepy fuck.”

He laughs again. To anyone else it’s probably raspy and unappealing, but it makes your whole body, mutant blood included, feel warm.

“I ain’t waxin’ red for you, brother, but thanks for the motherfuckin’ invite.”

\- - -

You’re hesitant to leave the poor nutjob because you know he likes having you here and it’s not like people aren’t used to you squirreling your angsty ass away for days at a time anyway, but you still feel the Leader Itch and you feel a little anxious holing up so far off from everyone else for too long.

He’s pretty hesitant, too, but when you promise that you’ll visit again very soon, he seems to take it just fine. You also promise to sneak him some REAL food next time, and while he doesn’t outwardly show that he’s too concerned about nutrition, you can kind of tell that he’ll be looking forward to it.

By the time you make your way back to the main portion of the lab, your clothes actually feel heavy with filth and dirt. You’re really hoping to escape back to your own little makeshift hole-in-the-wall hive for awhile to clean up and mentally recover from the whirlwind of complicated _feelings_ that just got dumped on you, but of course, you’re never so lucky.

Dave’s there, with his feet kicked up on the table in front of him, a pad of paper resting against his legs, and a pen in his mouth. He’s been trying to write his idiotic raps as a means to pass the time, and it’s starting to drive you crazy. You can’t be in the same room with him anymore without his constant muttering and talking to himself and asking everyone aloud what they think about this line like anyone actually even gives three flying, pirouetting _fucks_ what his pea-brain can come up with.

Okay, when he’s not doing that or, really, harassing you about anything else, he’s not THAT bad. Hell, if he was a mute quadriplegic, he’d be downright tolerable. But only on a good day. And those don’t happen so often anymore. And it's also rare occasion when you don't immediately take everything he says to you as harassing you in one way or another.

You try to get around him as quietly and inconspicuously as you can but unfortunately he’s not wearing his fucking headphones this time and your footsteps, no matter how soft they are, sound way too fucking loud in the vast emptiness of the rest of the room. Dave’s hearing is surprisingly sharp, considering how loud he’s usually shoving his shitty music into his ear canals, and he immediately looks up from his notepad, expression neutral, eyebrows slightly raised.

“Hey,” he greets you.

“Hey.”

“Sup.”

You can feel yourself bristling a little. Casual discussion might be something the humans can do with just anyone, but not you.

“Nothing.”

Like claws scraping against metal.

One of his eyebrows arches a little higher than the other.

“You kinda smell like garbage.”

Everything about this ‘conversation’ is already pissing you off, from the company you’re sharing to his stupid, blank face to his drawling voice. All you want is to bathe and rest, even though bathing is honestly probably the most you’re going to accomplish, and you are three _literal_ seconds from exploding.

Instead, you grate out, “Shut the fuck up.”

His lips twist into a small smirk and you want to tear it off of his face.

“Really,” you press, louder this time. “I’m not in the mood for you today, Strider.”

“No man, what the hell did you crawl into because you’re caked in whatever smells bad. Like. _Caked_.”

“Are you _deaf_? Do those useless little rounded nubs that you dare to call ears even fucking work or is it just your brain just malfunctioning due to neglect?” Now you’re yelling. “I said, _not in the mood_. What the fuck part of _not in the mood_ isn’t processing in that fucking decrepit, dilapidated _swamp_ in your fucking head?”

“Chill out-“

“No, _fuck_ you, and _fuck_ your inability to comprehend a simple request from someone who is _pretty obviously because he SAID IT_ not in the mood.”

“Jesus Christ-“

“You have your own pitiful shit to worry about, so worry about it and leave my shit alone or so help me fucking _gog_ I will rip that fucking notebook out of your hands, I will eat it, and I will fucking digest all of your incomprehensible hard work _remorselessly, you piece of shit_.”

“Karkat.”

“ _WHAT_.”

You’re breathing a little too hard. You had absolutely no control over that outburst. You wait for him to speak his stupid empty mind with the soundtrack of your blood thrumming in your ears.

“…go take a damn bath dude.”

You wish you had at least ten more hands to flip him off with.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can deny your irritation until your grey skin turns blue, but apparently you’re not all that good at being inconspicuous. You suppose people have always considered you somewhat transparent when it comes to your feelings because you’ve always been pretty (incredibly) loud about them, but you’re still not used to facing the possibility of considering an open admittance to them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're gonna go ahead and say for the sake of the story that husk/laptop communication amongst meteor-babies is A Thing That Is Allowed. 
> 
> Little hiccup in the formatting BUT WE GOT THIS GUYS. I will never write another pesterlog again. :D
> 
> * * *

At least the sorry trainwreck of a finish to your (blissfully) brief little discussion with Dave gave you a great opening to storm right the fuck out of there before you lost your composure entirely. All you wanted to do in the first place before the gigantic pain in the ass stopped you was clean up.

Once you’ve done that and you have a chance to finally relax a little, you settle down at your husktop because you feel so drained that if you sit or lay on something even _remotely_ comfortable, you’ll probably just fall asleep. As much as your body would really appreciate it, your mind is still a little too busy, a little too loud. Also, your head is starting to ache.

Thankfully, there’s a message waiting for you. Anything to keep you up and alert, you figure, as you give in to curiosity and maximize the chat window.

 

**\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--**

**GA:    Karkat Are You There  
GA:    I Am Overhearing Some Blather About You Completely Against My Wishes And I Am Just Checking On You  
** GA:    While It Is Not Imperative That You Respond In A Timely Fashion  
GA:    I Would Very Much Like To Hear From You Soon  
GA:    I Am A Little Concerned  
CG:    HEY.  
GA:    Oh There You Are  
CG:    WHAT AM I READING ABOUT BLATHERING.  
GA:    Nothing To Fret Over  
GA:    Dave Just Happened To Mention To Rose That You Appeared Before Him In What He Referred To As The Shittiest Of Shitty Shapes Today  
GA:    Which I Am Assuming Means That You Had An Unfortunate Confrontation With Him  
GA:    Humans Seem To Enjoy Wording Things Very Colorfully  
CG:    OH OF COURSE. STRIDER AND HIS GARGATUAN FUCKING CREVICE.  
CG:    MARVEL AT HOW ACTUALLY SURPRISED I AM.  
GA:    Daves Occasional Bouts Of Ceaseless Talking Are Probably Part Of A Coping Mechanism  
GA:    I Do Not Know Him Well Enough To Say For Certain  
GA:    But That Is The Impression That I Have Been Forming  
CG:    THAT’S JUST CLASSICALLY PATHETIC.  
CG:    WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME SPECTACULAR FLYING SHITBOAT HERE. HE CAN FIND A DIFFERENT WAY TO COPE WITH HIS ISSUES OTHER THAN RUNNING HIS MOUTH, ESPECIALLY ABOUT ME.  
CG:    IT’S NONE OF HIS BUSINESS HOW I FEEL ABOUT FUCKING ANYTHING.  
GA:    I Am Not So Sure He Was The One Concerned  
GA:    I Think It Was Simply Him Pointing It Out  
CG:    THAT’S EVEN WORSE.  
CG:    THAT MEANS HE’S JUST DOING IT TO BE A GOSSIPY BITCH.  
CG:    AND AGAIN, HERE I AM, BEING SUPER FUCKING SURPRISED.  
CG:    CONGRATULATIONS, STRIDER, ON WINNING THE AWARD FOR HOW MANY TIMES YOU CAN SURPRISE ME IN ONE SITTING.  
CG:    NOW TAKE THAT AWARD AND SIT ON IT AND FUCKING ROTATE.  
GA:    You Are In Rare Form Today  
CG:    HOW IS THIS RARE, EXACTLY.  
GA:    You Have Not Been This Easily Triggered In Awhile Is What I Meant  
CG:    I’M TIRED OF THIS METEOR ALREADY.  
CG:    I’D HONESTLY RATHER CHOKE TO DEATH ON A THOUSAND FUCKING ANGRY THROBBING BULGES THAN BE STUCK HERE FOR ANOTHER TWO YEARS.  
CG:    OR IT IS STILL THREE.  
CG:    SEE, FUCK, I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE.  
GA:    If The Previously Estimated Time In Transit Is Still Correct  
GA:    Then It Will Be Two More Years  
GA:    That Aside  
GA:    Are You Just Angry Because You Want This Trip To Be Finished  
GA:    Or Did Something Happen To Upset You  
CG:    WHY  
CG:    DID DAVE FEED YOU THAT HORSESHIT, TOO.  
GA:    Not At All  
GA:    I Am Asking Due To My Own Surmising  
CG:    OH  
CG:    THEN  
CG:    NO  
CG:    NOTHING HAPPENED AND I’M FINE.  
GA:    Things Seem Especially Tumultuous With You And Dave Lately  
GA:    Am I Going To Have To Auspice Between You  
CG:    WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP ASKING THAT  
CG:    NO FUCKING WAY ARE WE ANYWHERE NEAR A QUADRANT OF ANY SHAPE OR COLOR.  
CG:    NO FUCKING WAY.  
GA:    I See  
GA:    Just Asking  
CG:    ANYWAY.  
CG:    THANKS FOR GIVING A SHIT AT ANY RATE.  
CG:    SCREEN’S HURTING MY EYES. LACK OF SLEEP AND ALL.  
CG:    CATCH YOU AROUND, KANAYA.

**\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling grimAuxiliatrix [GA]  \--**

 

You exit before she can get another line in. You’ve always felt that despite how smart she is, Kanaya seems to trust a little too easily for your taste. Strider could say _anything_ in her presence and she’d eventually start lobbing messages at you asking you to confirm the validity of his words. You’ve told her a few times now that you don’t trust him as far as you can throw him, which is ZERO DISTANCE, because you don’t want to touch him let alone pick him up.

It takes you another moment of staring at your blank screen to recognize that you may now have a problem. You’re officially keeping a secret. You _really_ don’t like keeping secrets.

The ache in your head is getting worse pretty quickly.  
Another message pops up on your screen and you curse under your breath when you read the name.

What in the actual motherfuck does he want this time?

 

**\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--**

**TG:    dude  
** TG:    ok listen  
TG:    im gonna get real real with you right now i hope youre ready  
TG:    i didnt mean to rag on you earlier but dude you really did stink  
TG:    like you got dragged through like five and a half miles of raw sewage  
TG:    by a garbage truck  
TG:    and then you hit like a massive speed bump made entirely of feces  
TG:    and got fuckin bushido flip kicked up into the back of the garbage truck  
TG:    and took a nice leisurely swim through stenchtown  
TG:    you know what i mean  
TG:    but hey man no hard feelings you can totally own something like that  
TG:    make it your destiny or something you dig  
TG:    your god tier or whatever  
TG:    the prince of stink  
TG:    are you there  
CG:    ARE YOU FUCKING DONE.  
TG:    hey man i tell it like i see it  
TG:    or smell it  
CG:    WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT STRIDER  
TG:    im just talkin  
TG:    im just making with the wordlove  
TG:    so whats up im getting this really crazy negative gravitational pull from you today  
TG:    and you came back from somewhere dirty and smelly  
TG:    the negativity im pretty used to by now but you dont make a habit of looking and smelling like a fat guys asscrack stuffed with three day old roadkill on the reg  
CG:    I REALLY WISH THAT I COULD AS CLEARLY AND PRECISELY AS POSSIBLE PORTRAY JUST HOW MUCH I DO *NOT* WANT TO DEAL WITH YOU TODAY.  
CG:    IT’S REACHED A CATASTROPHICAL LEVEL.  
CG:    IT’S TO THE POINT NOW WHERE IF I COULD REACH THROUGH MY HUSKTOP’S SCREEN AND BEAT THE ACTUAL, LITERAL SHIT OUT OF YOU, AS IN SO HARD THAT YOUR BODY’S ONLY VISCERAL AND INSTINCTUAL REACTION IS TO VIOLENTLY EXPRESS FORTH THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF YOUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM, I WOULD DO SO GLADLY AND IMMEDIATELY.  
CG:    AND YOU CAN BECOME THE KNIGHT OF HALF-DIGESTED SHIT.  
CG:    HOW DOES THAT SOUND.  
TG:    gross  
TG:    take it easy im not here to harass you  
CG:    WHICH IS WHAT YOU’VE BEEN DOING THIS ENTIRE FUCKING TIME, YOU INSUFFERABLE SACK OF BILE.  
TG:    cant a guy just joke around good quite possibly fictional christ  
TG:    i havent heard shit like this out of you in awhile  
TG:    something went down to hulk you out even worse than usual  
TG:    so what was it  
CG:    YOU’RE PRETTY HILARIOUS STRIDER.  
CG:    THINKING THAT IF ANYTHING DID HAPPEN  
CG:    AND THIS IS NOT A FUCKING ADMITTANCE TO ANYTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENING SO DON’T EVEN START  
CG:    THAT I WOULD ACTUALLY TELL YOU.  
CG:    GIVE ME ONE GOOD FUCKING REASON AS TO WHY I WOULD EVER POSSIBLY IN MY RIGHT OR WRONG MIND RELY ON YOU AS MORE THAN AN OCCASIONAL WASTE OF MY TIME, WHICH IS WHAT YOU SEEM TO BE REALLY FUCKING ADEPT AT.  
TG:    yeah i get it dude you dont want to tell me thats fine  
TG:    i am totally ok with you not wanting to tell me all your feels  
TG:    your precious precious feels  
TG:    truth be told i probably wouldnt understand most of them anyway  
TG:    i got the feeling though that we were maybe vibing a little better lately  
TG:    a simple no would have been pretty sufficient not gonna lie to you  
CG:    NO.  
TG:    aight thats cool  
TG:    but tell me something  
CG:    OH MY GOD.  
TG:    hear me out a sec  
TG:    lets pretend for a second that were not on a fucking rock hurling through whatever at the speed of light and losing our fuckin minds because all we want to do is get the fuck off already  
TG:    and lets pretend that people havent kicked numerous buckets and everything was chilly again  
TG:    if that were the case would your attitude toward us be any different  
TG:    like if things were just normal again and all you had to do with your free time was attempt to troll us some more  
TG:    would you have reacted so strongly to my observation of your extremely pisspoor hygienic state  
TG:    even if id worded everything the same right down to the asscrack jab  
TG:    do you ever stop to think that if that were the case you maybe wouldnt have taken your graceful swandive into unadulterated and sorry to be honest but kind of unnecessary rage  
TG:    because i think either youre not telling us something  
TG:    or youre just fucking sick of this meteor like the rest of us  
TG:    and you have no outlet except for verbally slapping all of us in the dick  
TG:    cant we just be buddies why you gotta go smacking dicks  
TG:    like big floppy hate piñatas  
TG:    karkat  
TG:    hello  
TG:    was it the numerous buckets thing

**\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] \--**

 

Enough of that.

You slam your husktop shut so hard that it actually jumps off of the table a little.

You are definitely developing a migraine, and his dumbass words mixed with the fucking colour that he insists on typing in is really not helping.

You can deny your irritation until your grey skin turns blue, but apparently you’re not all that good at being inconspicuous. You suppose people have always considered you somewhat transparent when it comes to your feelings because you’ve always been pretty (incredibly) loud about them, but you’re still not used to facing the possibility of considering an open admittance to them. Three of your fellow travelers have noticed just how bothered you are already, and you can’t for the fucking life of you imagine telling them why. Not honestly, at least.

The secrecy is for Gamzee’s benefit, anyway. Not yours.

Something sizzles suspiciously inside of your husktop.

 _Great_.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He crosses his arms over his chest defiantly. You immediately know what this is, too; typically he’s pretty good at leaving you to your own devices in person (through messages is a totally different story), but he’s got something on you, now. He knows that you’re suddenly hoarding some kind of precious information, something that you’re suspiciously stubborn about keeping to yourself, and he knows that there’s only so much you can be wanting to keep a secret about so abruptly on a goddamn meteor where there is really not much of anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wooo updating this sucker at the speed of ... someone who posts a chapter a day, yeeeaah.
> 
> Again, thanks for all the Kudos, kids. I do actually like comments so don't hesitate to leave any if you wanna. :)
> 
> * * *

So you broke your husktop.

You shouldn’t be mad, because it was _your_ hand that did the breaking but you’re mad anyway, so you point your anger toward the only other person who was involved in your little tantrum. _He_ was the one who pissed you off enough to make you do it, right? 

You have been missing Sollux like the past few months, but right now with your blank screen sitting in front of you, a small patch of cracks spreading out from one corner like a spiderweb, you miss him _desperately_. He only showed you a couple of things that could fix a busted husktop, but you were always too busy screaming about something else or backhandedly insulting him to _really_ listen. You probably should have paid closer attention.

Now you feel guilty again.

This was your only way of communicating with the people on this meteor without having to actually socialize or show your face, so suddenly the realization that you might have to start doing those things hits you and you don’t know why, you really don’t, but it only makes you angrier. Despite never having really LIKED being social, you got used to sharing one lab with eleven other trolls and adapted to their quirks and their annoying habits and their ear-grating background noise. You’ve become a recluse because it helps you cope with things a little easier. The quiet and solitude is good to you.

There’s always the option to avoid everyone entirely, but you have to peel yourself out of seclusion to check on Gamzee again soon and you know you’re probably going to have to talk to someone along the way. You just don’t want to deal with it right now. …or ever, if you’re totally honest. That’s what the damn husktop was for.

You make a feeble attempt to single out the main problem, inspecting the screen closely, gingerly pushing against the cracked corner and coming to the conclusion that the ‘main problem’ is that you threw a little huffy bitchfit like a big crybaby asshole and closed the fucking thing too hard. Good assessment.

Sighing heavily, you close the poor, battered device again – _gently_ and _correctly_ this time – and slump back into your seat, digging the heels of your hands into your eyes. Now you just feel grumpy and drained and all you really wanted to do was _relax_ a little, after your encounter in the vents.

Your thoughts drift to Gamzee entirely.

You realize that you’re kind of in deeper shit than you want to be, taking up the role as Gamzee’s only actual connection to the rest of the group. You know that mostly everyone just kind of prefers him out of the way and out of sight (though you can’t actually imagine why; if _you_ thought that he was just a psychopath and he was lurking around somewhere unseen, you would likely never sleep again), but you know how others operate by now, and you know that you WILL be looked at differently if they knew you were taking it upon yourself to support him. Kanaya, vengeful as she might be, would understand a little more than the humans would, considering he’s your fucking moirail and you’re stuck _caring_ about him, but there will still be a level of uneasiness for him that will probably shift a little into your direction. 

Normally, you’d claim that you don’t give a shit about how they perceive you.

If you said that now, you’d be lying a little.

 

\- - -

 

It only takes you a handful of hours to realize that without your husktop, you are bored out of your fucking skull.

It only takes you a handful of hours to accept the fact that you’re going to need food for both yourself AND your dumbass moirail soon, and since your only source of entertainment, information, and sanity has shit the proverbial bed, you may as well swallow your antisocial instincts for a little while and venture back out of your closed-off little cocoon. 

Your reconnaissance mission goes seemingly smoothly and uninterrupted, at first, which you’re thankful for as you make your way back down those maddeningly long hallways with an armful of sustenance. You like to think that you’re quiet and sneaky enough to pull this off without having to talk to anyone, but of course, of _course_ , the moment you begin to develop an ego about anything no matter how small it is, is the moment something sticks its leg out in front of you and fucking trips you up.

You run into Dave again.

Almost literally this time.

He appears out of fucking _nowhere_ and you jump, curse him loudly, and give yourself half a second to calm down. You were SO CLOSE to making it, too, and it just figures that the snide asshole wants to talk now, of all times. Just… appearing in the center of a doorway so completely unexpectedly that you could swear he appeared out of the air.

Instead of letting him see too much of your surprise (oh he’d probably love that, wouldn’t he?), you scowl at him and kind of bundle your provisions a little closer to your chest.

“Move,” you say firmly.

He watches you, completely unfazed, from behind his dark glasses.

“ _Move_.”

He crosses his arms over his chest defiantly. You immediately know what this is, too; typically he’s pretty good at leaving you to your own devices in person (through messages is a totally different story), but he’s got something on you, now. He knows that you’re suddenly hoarding some kind of precious information, something that you’re _suspiciously_ stubborn about keeping to yourself, and he knows that there’s only so much you can be wanting to keep a secret about so abruptly on a _goddamn meteor_ where there is really not much of anything.

“Do not make me fucking kill you.”

The threat is an empty one. You know that. 

He knows it, too.

He knows it so well that he even puffs out his chest a little. He’s telling you with his body language that he’s done fooling around and he tried talking with you the easy way and now he’s got his serious face on.

But you’re just as stubborn as he is, so you just barely maintain what’s left of your composure and try to move around him. He does exactly what you’re expecting and shifts to the side to keep blocking you.

“Strider,” you growl warningly, and his eyebrows lift above the rim of his glasses.

“Listen.” He finally speaks, and you’re tempted to barrel yourself into him shoulder-first to knock him out of your way because the last thing you want to do right now is listen to him. But he derails you by not actually giving you a choice, by continuing to talk and letting his words rise a little higher in volume than usual.

“We’re all stuck here, man. So far we’ve been kind of entertaining or ignoring this whole special snowflake wet blanket shit you have going for you and maybe that’s part of your culture or species or whatever and that’s cool. I’m not gonna shit on you for being what you are ‘cause that’s stupid, especially when I gotta live with you for another two freakin’ years.” Despite the additional volume to his voice, you have to admit that he is _really_ good at maintaining a cool demeanor. If this had been you, you’d be screaming and throwing things by now. Which is kind of what you want to do at the moment, anyway. 

He keeps going. “But if I’m trying to accept all your alien bullshit, you should probably think about accepting all of _our_ human bullshit because that’s just what you do in a situation like this. You adapt, you know? Acclimatize. And our human bullshit includes curiosity, and really I just want to know where the hell you were that smelled like that and made you _that_ dirty because ever since you found wherever it was, your temper is _actually the worst_ , bro.”

You’ve just been staring at him like a defensive animal this whole time, armful of food still crushed to your chest. You are having a _serious_ battle with said temper right now because he’s making sense, for ONCE he’s actually saying something useful instead of spraying fecal matter from his mouth like he usually does, but at the same time, he is absolutely pissing you right the fuck off with his stupid, silly human ideals and wanting to ‘talk it out’ with you. Hell, you’re even pissed at _yourself_ for wanting to ‘talk it out’ right back with him, even if just a little.

NOTHING would make you happier than feeling his nose cracking under your knuckles right now.

But at the same time, you would feel like a _tremendous douchebag_ for hitting him.

So instead, you just barely tolerate him essentially asking you why you got so angry at him earlier and decide that you aren’t going to be the source of HIS entertainment today, not even a little. You aren’t going to apologize because fuck that, and you aren’t going to agree or debate with him because fuck that, also. You take in a deep breath; it does nothing to calm you down.

“Move out of my way, _please_.” The ‘please’ is coated in as much arrogantly sarcastic bile that you can dig up because you are, as you said to him _several times_ now, really Not In The Mood.

And the asshole is still. Standing. In. Your way.

“You’re really not gonna tell me anything, huh?”

You explode a little.

“What the fuck are we, Strider, little wrigglers at a stay-over? I’m not fucking on this _piece of shit_ rock to gossip with you and I _sure as motherfuck_ am not here to let you in on every little fucking thing that goes on in my life. You want to know what’s WRONG, Strider? I’m _tired_ , I’m _annoyed_ , actually no, fuck that, I’m not annoyed, I’m _barely_ holding myself back from socking you in the _fucking mouth_ , and I need to eat before I starve and my fucking computer is broken and I am not going to just put up with your _shit_ right now!” You feel like a skipping record. When is it finally going to sink in? “Is that satisfactory? Will you remove yourself from my _fucking path now_?”

He’s still just standing there, useless waste of skin and bones and organs, with that infuriatingly blank expression.

“…wait, your laptop’s broken?”

“ _Husk_ top,” you correct him through gritted teeth. “And yes, no fucking thanks to you.”

He smirks again, only one side of his mouth tilting up.

“Did you really break your computer because you were pissed at me?”

If the bundles of food against your chest were alive, your hold on them would probably be suffocating them by now.

Something must have happened to your expression, you don’t know, because his smirk cools down a little and whatever he’d just been opening his mouth to say, he’s changed his mind against. Instead, he seems to change tactics. “Want me to look at it?”

You can feel yourself deflating, and it feels kind of awful. “What.”

“Do you want me to look at it?” He repeats it slowly, and you can’t tell if it’s unintentional or if he’s being an ass, talking to you like you’re stupid, and you _almost_ boil back up into anger when he cuts in, “Your laptop. Husktop. Whatever the hell.”

“What the fuck do you even know about Alternian technology?”

He lifts one shoulder, drops it. “Prob’ly nothing? But I can try, I _was_ pretty much raised by a dude who knew a thing or two about computers and robots and shit.”

You turn to eying him suspiciously. “Why are you offering to do this again?”

He raises his hands defensively and finally shifts out of your way, edging around and away from you. “S’cool, you don’t want your thing-top to work anymore, your prerogative I guess. Not my malfunction.”

You don’t trust his motives. At all. Because he’s Dave Strider and you haven’t truly trusted him from the day you first started trolling him. But… then again, you really want your connection to everything back. Even going less than half a day without it has been kind of brutal.

So, like the most intellectually-deficient piece of shit that you can actually be sometimes, you stop his retreating form with an offensively uncertain, “Okay, fine.”

He glances at you over his shoulder and gives you a grin that tells you all about the potential mistake you just made, in great, extravagant detail.

You really need to stop being so fucking gullible.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It feels intrusive and invasive from the moment he steps foot over the threshold, but you try not to give him time to loiter or start really looking or picking at things. He’s here for one purpose, and _only_ one purpose, and that is to fix your husktop. And then kindly get the hell out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand we're also gonna pretend that Karkat scooped his Recuperacoon as well as a variety of maybe-slightly-useful objects into his sylladex before all the crap went down, just roll wit' it.
> 
> * * *

He’s the first person that you’ve allowed into your ‘room’ since the meteor started moving.

After separating from all of your friends, you’ve actually really come to enjoy your solitude, as overwhelming as it can be sometimes. It’s mostly when you’re _upset_ that it starts to be a problem, and you don’t get upset too often anymore because anger is a LOT easier to deal with, you think.

It feels intrusive and invasive from the moment he steps foot over the threshold, but you try not to give him time to loiter or start really looking or picking at things. He’s here for one purpose, and _only_ one purpose, and that is to fix your husktop. And then kindly get the hell out.

Unfortunately, his human curiosity kicks into gear much too quickly and not even seconds after he’s in, he looks around himself and jerks his thumb toward your Recuperacoon. You are especially protective over it because it's one of the only things you really managed to keep with you for this little _adventure_.

“What’s that thing?”

“That’s my _bed_ , you jackass,” you reply curtly, settling yourself down in front of your husktop.

He lowers his hand, crosses his arms over his chest again, still looking at it. “All the slimy shit?”

“It’s called sopor slime.” You are trying your damndest not to give into your instincts and kick him right the fuck out, because you need your husktop working again and if he’s the only one here who can make that happen, so be it. “And its use is none of your damn business.”

Dave shrugs and moves a little closer to where you’re sitting, his attention successfully averted to where it needs to be. He stops behind you, and he almost feels a little TOO close; his presence and proximity are unnerving.

“Holy fuck, nice crack, there.”

You turn around enough to glare up at him.

He jabs his chin toward the computer. “The screen, genius, settle your nubs or whatever.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” you ground out as you face the other direction again. “Just fix the fucking thing.” 

He hums thoughtfully, before nudging your chair. Your nerves are still grated, so you instantly have to bite back some kind of rude verbal response to being jarred. “Yeah, get up, let me look at it.”

You reluctantly rise and move out of the way to let him sit, crossing your own arms around you. You feel like you’re sulking and shit, maybe you are. “Just… be fucking careful okay? That thing is my lifeline right now.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters as he settles himself on your chair and does _exactly_ what you did when you first noticed the cracking – he pushes against the damage gently. Then, he scoops the husktop into his hands and slowly lifts it to one of his ears.

You’re staring at him like he’s a moron, because right now you think he is. “What the fuck-“

“Shh, dude, shut up,” he murmurs back and waits another couple of seconds before putting it back down. “It’s _on_. I can hear it, it’s definitely doing a thing, I think maybe you just fucked up the screen.”

You are partially irritated that you had to have HIM come all the way here to suss that out, and partially relieved that it may not be something more serious.

“So what do I do?” Relieved as you are, the declaration severely dropped your patience to get it working again.

He thinks on it for a minute.

“Got any tools?”

And it just so happens, you actually do.

 

-  -  -

 

You were more than willing to let him borrow anything and everything in your room for him to get his job done as required, but now the waiting around and not knowing _exactly_ what he’s doing is starting to get to you.

You tried hovering and tried taking control of the operation and he tolerated you up to a certain point before he finally told you, “Okay, Karkat, can you fuck off for a few minutes, you’re really distracting me.”

You gave him the usual _fuck you, eat shit_ routine but you listened and put some distance between the two of you because the less distracted he is, the quicker he can finish up and go. Then you started to hear the noises of things being snapped and pulled apart and your mind conjured up the _worst_ most violent assaults against technology that it possibly could, and that’s when you turned away.

With Dave’s attention drawn elsewhere, you used the opportunity to start rifling through your provisions and set some aside for Gamzee. You’re glad; you really didn’t want Dave to see you doing this because he’s fucking nosy and you don’t want to field any questions about anything right now.

“Who used to do this shit for you before?” he asks out of nowhere.

You don’t even look up. “I hope you’re working while you’re asking me questions.”

“I’m _trying_ to, this fucker is complicated.”

You sigh in quiet aggravation.

“…Sollux did,” you eventually reply.

“Huh?” The noises stop for a second. “Oh wait, is that the dude with the eyes?”

You almost snort. “Yes.”

The noises start again, just as you’re considering turning around to see what the holdup is.

“Smart, huh?” he asks distractedly.

“Smarter than most of us,” you reply with just as much detachment in your voice, focusing on shoving Gamzee’s portions of food into a box you found in what’s been unofficially declared as the kitchen area (more or less with the help of the strange Mayo creature) in an attempt to ward off any emotional gut-response over Sollux and what happened to him. “Fucking dumber in a few ways, too.”

“Yeah man,” he agrees all too openly. You hear another ‘crack’ from his direction and you take in a long breath. He better not be breaking your shit even more back there. “Humans are like that too, you know? Some of us _think_ we’re smart, and a lot of us think we’re the absolute shit and being smart isn’t important anymore because we got money or bitches or whatever. Those of us who are ACTUALLY smart are on the sidelines laughing our asses off over the whole deal.”

He sounds like he’s speaking from personal experience, which is funny considering how slow and stupid you think his accent makes him sound. You coldly voice this to him.

He makes a ‘ffftt’ noise. “I know I’m smart. Ain’t nobody gonna prove otherwise, trick.” You wish you could snag the chance to drum up another insult to try and damage his annoying ego, but he proves his own point when you hear an unidentified tool hit your table and he says, “A’right, let’s see if that worked.”

Your curiosity instantly spikes and you’re on your feet and moving to the desk way faster than you realize. You rest a hand on the back of the chair he’s sitting in and lean in anxiously as he opens the screen back up.

There’s nothing anyone can do about the prominent cracking, it’s not like you have a replacement screen sitting around, but it flickers on and for a second, you can’t believe that the asshole figured it out.

You turn your eyes to him unbelievingly. He’s smiling up at you, close-lipped and smug.

“How the _fuck_ did you do that with just a few tools?”

“Your simple tech isn’t THAT diff’rent from ours,” he says with another shrug. “I figured out how to get your screen bezel off. All you did was knock your LCD cables loose so they weren’t seated the right way, so I smooshed that shit back into place, replaced the screen, and wham bam thank you ma’am.” He holds up a small portion of the screen that didn’t make it, just a little piece in the corner. “This was the only one that didn’t survive but everything else should be okay. Not makin’ you any promises or anything, ‘cause it’s pretty likely that any jerky movement’ll make the stuff loose again. Actually that happened right at the end, but everything was technically still connected so I, uh.” He mimes a small swiping motion with his hand. “Smacked it. And it worked. So. Yeah.”

“You... smacked it.”

“Yup. So if it like, goes out on you again out of nowhere, just try that.”

“How is it okay to smack someone else’s fucking computer?”

“Dude, I fixed the damn thing, give me some credit here.”

You don’t want to, but you know that you should. He _is_ right. He _did_ fix it.

Suck it up.

You mumble something at him, and out of the corner of your averted eyes you can see him lean in a little closer.

“What was that, now?”

You repeat yourself, but you aren’t really making any effort to enunciate better.

“Come on buddy, one more time?”

“Holy _batshitting fuck_ , Strider, thank you, okay? Will you please go the fuck away now?”

He grins, this time showing teeth, and nudges you in the shoulder with his elbow as he stands and move to the door. “Wasn’t devastatingly hard, was it?”

You shoot daggers at him with your eyes and pitch one of your tools at the door as he closes it behind him.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He grunts, though not loudly, and while he seems be to caught off guard for a second with his eyes screwed shut to brace for landing (he’s fought before, you can tell just by the way his body protectively curls in on itself to take the impact instead of sprawling out to look for purchase on something), he is all too aware that he might be in actual danger somehow and before you can finish one fucking blink, he’s got something in his hand and he’s brandishing it far, far too close to your face.
> 
> Holy fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATE A DAY STILL IN EFFECT. Writing this in 15 minute spurts at work is literally keeping me from going _nuts_ at work, just FYI.
> 
> I can't get over 800+ hits and 40+ Kudos in only what, six days that this story's been active? You guys are awesome. If anyone has a tumblr, hit me up! I'm over at --> [bbbbangarang](http://bbbbangarang.tumblr.com)
> 
> * * *

Getting Gamzee’s provisions through that claustrophobic little crawlspace that leads into his… room, you guess you could call it, it way harder than it really needs to be. You resort to pushing the box ahead of you gradually and shoving yourself after it, a few inches at a time. You obviously can’t tell how long your rendezvous sessions with him are going to last, but you’re already thinking that you’re going to take a really long time getting used to slithering through this fucking thing just to see him. If you EVER get used to it, even.

He must know you’re coming, with how much noise it takes to pull the grating off of the wall (how does he REPLACE it when he’s sneaking back in here? that’s something you’ve been wondering and something you’re probably going to ask him a later on), but he still looks a little surprised when you show up at the mouth of the vent, barking at him to “Get over here and help me, what the fuck.”

He does, because he seems intrigued about your gift. He takes that first, sets it on the ground, and helps you out of the vent so that you _don’t_ fall out like an idiot this time. You’re momentarily jarred by how strong he is for having such a thin, unhealthy looking build, but then you remember that you’re far shorter and smaller in stature than he is and embarrassingly enough, it makes sense, now.

You take a second to dust yourself off a little before bending to pick up the box and shove it back into his hands indignantly. “ _Here_ , jerkoff. This is yours.”

He blinks down at it, cradling it inside a cage of long, spidery fingers, and you _hate_ how normal he looks, how curious and confused and, fuck, just _normal_. You suppose the words ‘normal’ and ‘Gamzee’ never truly fit into the same sentence together comfortably, but right now, he’s more normal than you think you’ve ever seen him. It in equal parts both relieves you and scares the shit out of you.

“What is it?” he asks, holding the box on the bottom with one of his hands while the other starts to pick it open.

“Food,” you reply, crossing your arms and watching him pointedly. “So you can stop looking so fucking emaciated.”

Something flashes in his eyes that you can only recognize as excitement, because the second that box is open, he’s digging into it like he’s gone mad (again), scooping the food up with his bare hand and shoveling it sloppily and carelessly into his mouth. He’s so into it that he doesn’t even bother to move anywhere else, just eventually lowers himself into a cross-legged position on the dirty floor.

You stay standing, because no thanks, and you watch him with sympathy tugging at your chest. He played off eating like it wasn’t a big deal, but clearly he’s been wanting for food worse than HE even thought he was. It only takes a handful of minutes _if that_ until it’s nothing but crumbs and he’s sucking on his fingers with the most incredibly satisfied look on his paint-streaked face.

You can’t help it. You smirk at him. “Good?”

“ _Karkat_ ,” he says as he places the box aside and stretches his arms back behind him, leaning on them with his heels pressed into the floor. “That… was like being motherfuckin’ born again.”

And that’s kind of exactly what you wanted to hear.

You almost offhandedly mention the _personal hell_ that you went through to get it for him, but your gut tells you that maybe talking about Dave to Gamzee isn’t the safest or best idea. You’ve seen your moirail’s eyes land on him only one or two times since the scratch, just before he disappeared into complete solitude, and you didn’t like the darkness that settled across his face as a result. You figure it’s probably safer to leave Strider _out_ of the picture when it comes to Gamzee, for the time being.

“I can keep doing this for you,” you say instead. “I _knew_ you were fucking lying to me when you said your appetite was shit.”

“It _is_ shit, my brother,” he responds lightly. “Until I got something in front of my motherfuckin’ face and I can smell it and I ain’t got much of a choice.”

You can understand that. “Well, I’m going to keep doing it, then. I kind of want you to stay _alive_.”

He chuckles and shrugs so damn casually like the two of you are sitting around watching the clouds discussing the fucking weather and NOT the fact that he has been slowly and gradually starving himself. “Much fuckin’ appreciation, as always.”

Now is where the two of you falls silent and while he doesn’t mind, idly bringing one of his hands up to pick food out from between his sharp teeth with a claw, you feel a little awkward, not knowing what else to say.

“…how are you doing on sleep, anyway?” It’s half to fill the quiet between you, and half because you’ve actually been legitimately wondering since you found this place the day before.

He stops picking and leans back on both arms again, tilting his head slightly to one side. “Don’t do much of that anymore, my man.”

“You have to get SOME in. I’ve stayed awake for days at a time, it really fucks with your head.”

“Hell fuckin’ yeah it does.” He grins, just a small one. “I get naps in, little snoozes. Can’t let myself get deeper than that, ‘ccount of the lack of mother _fuckin_ ’ slime, bro.” He stresses ‘fuckin’ a little too much for your comfort and something in you is immediately put on alert. “Else shit goes way down the tubes.”

“Nightmares?”

You hate when your mouth does things before your brain gives it the green light.

His grin stays, but it changes somehow. It doesn’t look so genuine and innocent anymore. You can’t tell what he did to it to make it that way, but now, especially while it’s turned on you, it making you nervous. “Yeah. Yeah, sure. Nightmares.”

You shift uncomfortably.

“I still have slime in my Recuperacoon-“

Your thought is cut off with one sharp bark of laughter. It’s not very happy laughter, either.

“Naw, bro. Naw. No way. Ain’t goin’ back to that shit.” He straightens his posture, resting his elbows on his crossed knees. “It’s nothing but motherfuckin’ lies, brother. Used to be so fucked up and blind but now. Now I see so clearly, so motherfuckin’ _vividly_ , catch what I’m saying?”

You… don’t really. He probably thought you were asking if he wanted to ingest it. Really, you just wanted to sneak him some to help sedate him into a quiet, _real_ sleep. But you realize after the fact, after his rejection, that he’d probably shove it into his stupid fucking mouth if it was sitting a few feet away from him, let alone having it slathered ON him. 

You hesitate before asking, because you’re not fully convinced that you want to know the answer, “What do you mean, ‘see’? What are you ‘seeing’?”

His grin widens, all teeth, and for the first time in a long time, you are almost afraid of him again. Almost.

“Storms, my righteous brother. Lots and fuckin’ lots of storms.”

 

-  -  -

 

A few days pass since your last visit with Gamzee, and you aren’t going to lie to yourself, you know the reason why. 

You still aren’t positive that Gamzee could ever do anything awful to you, since you seem to have a connection with him that FAR surpasses the ones that anyone else had (except, maybe, Tavros, but Tavros’ death really had nothing to do with Gamzee at all). You DO start to think that maybe your moiraillegiance with him is one of the biggest and most prominent things protecting you from his lingering instability, and you hate yourself for thinking that because it threatens to insert a new level of paranoia in you all together.

You figured that maybe thinking on the whole situation a little better might really help, so you tell him that you need to keep a low profile because some of your travel-mates are getting suspicious (not exactly a lie; you’d have to be brain-dead not to notice the way Kanaya and Rose look at you now) and you leave a HUGE ration of food for him at the entrance to his hideout. You tell him that you’ll be back soon to check on him and that if he really needs you, to get your attention the usual way.

He seems fine with that, to your relief. Which is good, because you’re pretty sure you pissed the Mayo guy off when you bumped into him on the way out with WAY too much fucking food for just you. Negligible. He doesn’t intimidate you. It usually even seems the other way around.

You spend the next couple of days alone, locked up in your room and admittedly thankful that nobody has had the gall to fucking bother you when you are clearly in one of Your Moods yet. You have been fielding a few messages, ignoring them for the most part and only answering, really, when it’s Kanaya trying to check in on you. Ignoring them hasn’t been all that hard, really; your husktop’s screen has been in a very persistent on-again-off-again stage and, curse him for being fucking right about something so _stupid_ , the only actual way to fix it when it happens is to… smack the fucking screen until it flickers back into place the way you want it to.

It worked for a little while, anyway.

Just now, it fizzled off and refused to come back on, even with a few really good (almost therapeutic in a sick way) open-palmed slaps. You wind up getting so fucking _frustrated_ with it that one of your smacks retreats and becomes an angry back-hand. You hit the thing with so much force that the blow scoots your husktop away from you across the table, the screen tilts back in a way that it is most definitely _not_ supposed to, and some of the precariously placed pieces of the broken corner come loose and clack to the tabletop.

You unleash an utterly unholy stream of expletives before slamming your elbows onto the table and ducking your head between them, your hands pushing into your own hair to start massaging the back of your stupid, reckless, shit-for-brains skull.

Okay. Calm down. Just get Dave in here again.

You _really_ wish that the idea wasn’t so appealing.

You wrestle with it for a few minutes, actually weighing the fucking pros and cons like a dipshit and eventually coming to the conclusion that if you _don’t_ get him in here, your husktop is staying broken, period. You know that he’ll do _something_ to get on your nerves, but if you can just swallow the irritation for _long enough_ , the payoff will be worth it. All you need is for him to fix your computer, and then you can go back to blissful silence and separation from him for a little bit longer.

You find him in the _exact_ same spot as you did before, still working on his stupid raps with his computer in front of him and his headphones now firmly in place. His positioning is even the same, with his feet on the table, but this time he’s leaning back a little more and the front legs of his chair are lifted off of the ground. You seize the opportunity for him being so distracted by creeping up behind his seat and, without any remorse because he’d do the same damn thing to you if your positions were swapped, giving the bottom of one of the supporting back legs a swift, sold shove with the heel of your shoe.

Predictably, he goes down. 

And it’s a hard land, too, the backing of the chair sending a _very_ satisfying crash against the floor through the otherwise quiet room. The buds in his ears are yanked out and fall limpy over the side of the table. He grunts, though not loudly, and while he seems be to caught off guard for a second with his eyes screwed shut to brace for landing (he’s fought before, you can tell just by the way his body protectively curls in on itself to take the impact instead of sprawling out to look for purchase on something), he is all too aware that he might be in actual danger somehow and before you can finish one fucking blink, he’s got something in his hand and he’s brandishing it far, far too close to your face.

Holy fuck.

The weapon is broken but the shattered edge is still jagged and _damn well_ still dangerous. The highest tip of it stops mere _inches_ from the bridge of your nose, the rest of it following an impeccably and _unnervingly perfect_ straight vertical line down the rest of your face. His hand is steady. His full attention is directly on you.

Neither of you move for a breath. Two. Three.

Then, he withdraws. The broken sword is gone, and he’s busying himself with clambering up off of his back and bending to pick his chair up to set it back down on all fours properly.

He casually drags his cape over his shoulder to peer at it, and dust it off.

You haven’t moved because you are pretty certain that if you do, you’re going to wet yourself.

He finishes, flips the cape back to its original position, and looks at you with a lifted eyebrow. “You’re scary-quiet, man. Make noise next time.”

You let out the air that you’ve been holding in your lungs this whole time, loudly and through your nose.

“Sup.”

You take in a new breath.

You are still completely baffled and genuinely shocked by _just how fucking fast_ that reaction was, just now.

“Uh.” …why ARE you even here, anyway? You clear your throat and shake yourself stubbornly, regaining composure relatively easily. You have a lot of questions about what just happened, but now isn’t the time. You doubt there actually will ever even BE a time. “I need your help again.”

“A’right,” he responds with a somewhat disinterested tone, shoving a finger into one of his ears and rubbing a little. His forehead just barely creases. He repeats the action with his other hand, other ear.

“My screen went out.”

“Did you try slappin’ it around?”

Does he _really_ think that you’re stupid? You roll your eyes. “Of course I did, brainache.”

He ‘hm’s semi-thoughtfully as he scoops his dropped notepad and pen off of the floor and places them back on the table. “So you want me to look at it again?”

You feel your jaw clench. “Gee, no, Strider, I was just coming out here to _keep you fucking informed_ , yes, I would like you to look at it again, come the fuck on.”

“Calm your titties, Karkat, I’ll take care of it.” He pauses, then lifts his hands and shoulders in a gesture that you read as _are we fucking going or not_.

You lead the way with your fists clenched.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You discover that Dave’s ‘aggravate’ option has an off switch, and you discover with no small amount of concern that the Dave who ISN’T annoying you is actually not awful to be around. He is curt, he’s to the point, and he’s really mellow, no many how many times you actually give into your instinct to snap something at him or call him something rude. He brushes it aside with ease, with a nonchalant shrugging of his shoulders.
> 
> It must be kind of refreshing to have THAT much control over his emotions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Moirails are slowly unhinging and oh, we're one chapter away from The Thing, The DaveKat Thing, would you look at that.
> 
> * * *

You watch him do it, this time.

You want to know the steps, because you need to put up with this shit for two more years and if things get progressively worse, you don’t want to have to rely on figuring out where the fuck he is and dragging him back to your room every time something goes wrong. You’re sure to be outwardly and loudly headstrong about it, too; you tell him that you’re going to watch him very closely and he says that’s fine, just shut up while you do it and you tell him to suck your nub and that pretty much ends the conversation, especially after the small grimace that came in response on his part.

You count it as a win for you.

Surprisingly, you find that Dave is actually _very_ patient and you can’t even sass or insult him while he takes you through the process of removing the screen and adjusting the cables because you find yourself genuinely interested in what he’s doing. You’ve never really gone out of your way to be particularly _nice_ to him, but he’s being civil and you have questions for him. When you ask them, he answers seriously.

You discover that Dave’s ‘aggravate’ option has an off switch, and you discover with no small amount of concern that the Dave who ISN’T annoying you is actually not awful to be around. He is curt, he’s to the point, and he’s really mellow, no many how many times you actually give into your instinct to snap something at him or call him something rude. He brushes it aside with ease, with a nonchalant shrugging of his shoulders.

It must be kind of refreshing to have THAT much control over his emotions.

You expect him to fully revert back to his usual stuff and go about picking your room apart again, but instead, he finishes his work (turns out, the cables were not just knocked loose but came completely apart; another unnecessary tantrum over another relatively easy fix, story of your fucking life), stands up, claps you on the back a little too hard, and leaves without saying anything.

You pretend that you aren’t put off by it.

 

-  -  -

 

Five days after your last visit with Gamzee, he contacts you again through a vent in a hallway.

He seems very distressed. He doesn’t even want to talk through the grates, he just asks if you can come by.

Of course, you do it without hesitation – the only thing that keeps you from getting there immediately is your stop by the pantry to get more food for him. You suppose that maybe you should have been paying better and closer attention to rationing but the last couple of times you grabbed provisions for Gamzee, you were distressed or in a huge hurry. It wasn’t exactly the first thing on your mind.

Once you’re through the crawlspace, he doesn’t even _bother_ with the food. He puts it down and pulls _you_ into him, instead, squeezing you almost a little too hard. He is absolutely _enveloping_ you, and you can’t for the fucking life of you shake the feeling that something went wrong.

Fortunately, your intuition is a little off when you’re backed up against the edge of panic. You ask him what’s wrong, tell him to fucking talk to you, right now, while you run your hands slowly up and down his back and ignore his filth in favour of ducking your head against his chest, _anything_ to make him feel a little calmer, a little more like he’s safe.

“Ain’t seen you in awhile,” he mutters back, and you feel his sharp chin come to rest on the top of your head.

“Sorry,” you mutter, and an apology just sounds and feels so meaningless on your tongue right now. “I have to lay low too, you know, _someone_ has to hold all of these fuckers together.”

You’d like to believe that. You’d REALLY like to believe that. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that probably none of the others actually still look up to you as a leader anymore and it doesn’t change how fucking _sour_ you feel over it. You still get the urges, the needs to take control of every single little fucking thing and make sure that the morale is high even despite how often and loudly you proclaim not to give a shit about anyone (except Kanaya and Terezi; you could tell them that you don’t care about them until you’re out of breath and neither of them would believe you, and you wouldn’t believe you, either) but successfully carrying out those urges is _really_ difficult when there honestly really isn’t ROOM for a leader anymore. The fact that you are just as stuck as everyone else, and just as powerless to actually do anything about it, brings you down to a painfully equal level as them.

And you _hate_ that.

But Gamzee doesn’t need to know any of that. You’d like to stay the leader in SOMEONE’S eyes, even if it’s just for a little while longer.

He doesn’t respond, so you wind your arms tighter around him and link your hands at the small of his back. “Did your food last you?”

It was a good call normalizing the situation and diffusing it back to a comfortable level, because you feel him relax and he huffs one short breath of laughter out through his nose. “Barely,” he replies, and even his voice sounds a little more stable. “Had to learn me some motherfuckin’ self-restraint, know what I’m saying?”

You smile despite yourself. “About fucking time, Makara, Congratulations.” There’s that tentativeness again, something that lurks behind your words and even makes it as far as the backs of your teeth, but you never let it show in the strength of your voice because if there is one person still alive whom he can and _will_ still tolerate any level of teasing from, it’s you, and you suppose you should consider yourself _very fucking lucky_ for that.

You still wonder what constitutes as Going Too Far. But you also hope that you never actually find out.

Something was so off about him the last time you paid him a visit like this, but whatever it was seems to be gone this time and the small amount of obvious distress that he presented you with when you arrived dissipates quickly and easily. 

He starts leading you to that fucking pile again, that bed of dirty plush that caused you so much grief before, and you are so extremely AGAINST ever even touching the thing again let alone laying in it that you make it obvious and he catches on, and the _look_ he gives you breaks your stupid fucking ugly garish heart. It’s a look that lingers somewhere between disappointment and shame. Right now, that pile is his actual bed, he _sleeps on that thing_ , and he kind of can’t help that it’s shit that was dirty before he came along and it was the only thing soft enough to even pass off as remotely comfortable.

He’s still trying so hard to hold onto the one meager strand of normalcy that he somehow has left and once you realize that, saying no to him suddenly seems completely and wholly out of the question. 

You suck it up and you let him pull you down onto the pile and after a few minutes of your skin crawling and every hair on your body standing on end, you get used to the smell (which Dave has greatly exaggerated; it’s not THAT bad, though it is a little potent at first) and the dirt, which bothers you most of all, becomes negligible. When you have him laying next to you, both of you on your sides and facing one another, and his fingertips trailing along your face with such surprising gentility like you are this fragile, breakable thing that he wants to take care of and keep from shattering, the entire rest of the world closes around you and things like dirt and unpleasant smells don’t even exist. Instead of thinking about what you’re going to look or smell like after you leave, you think about what it could be like when you finally reach your destination, and if he’ll still be carrying this much clarity by then, and the idea of him not being okay anymore and reverting back to the insanity that plagued him before the scratch happened is the _worst_ thing, it’s the _worst thing_ you could ever think about.

You don’t think about it for long.

You drift away.

 

-  -  -

 

You allow yourself to drift deeper than you have in a long time.

You allow yourself to drift deeper than you want to.

It’s the first real dream – _real_ dream, nothing like being in a bubble or in Prospit or anything like that – that you’ve had in what feels like sweeps, and you chalk it up to such a long time of not sleeping properly and now suddenly depriving yourself of the slime in your Recuperacoon. It’s a fast dream, a violent one, tinged with shades of bright, angry reds and backed with tormented screams. It is visually disturbing and emotionally devastating, a dream that takes you by the shoulders with two blood-stained, claw-sharpened hands and grips you hard, shakes you like you’re nothing until you are fully expecting your neck snap with the force and you’re surprised it hasn’t yet. It’s a dream that tightens itself around your lungs like a vise and when you finally find that desperate little pocket between awake and asleep, reality and the knowledge that you’re dreaming, and when you rip yourself out of it, you are _gasping_ for air and your hands are shaking and you’re drenched in sweat and even the sweet, beautiful relief of knowing that it wasn’t real can’t distract you from feeling disoriented and sick to your stomach.

When your senses return and you remember where you are, your eyes seek out the company that you held before you fell asleep and you spot him, sitting a few feet away from the pile with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, elbows resting on them and long arms extended, watching you with the most _unnervingly_ blank expression, as if he’s not sure how to expressively respond to you and what just happened to you. 

Now you know first-hand why he doesn’t sleep deeply anymore. 

But it’s hard to relate to him when you are almost positive that the one holding you in a death grip with his bare hands had the same facial scars, the same unhinged quality to his smile, the same passive disconnection in his eyes. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And the first thing that you think, shit for brains that you are, is _I’m not dead, why the fuck is he trying to revive me._
> 
> He’s not trying to revive you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah, so. well. DaveKat is officially a go. Happy Marriage Is Finally Freaking Legal In My State Day!
> 
> * * *

You are exhausted.

Your mind still feels fucked up and your body is heavy and _aching_ now that the onrush of adrenaline has cleared its way out of your system. Your nerves are frayed. You are approaching the end of your proverbial rope very quickly.

You need a bath.

Once you’re cleaned up, having rushed a little to avoid letting your thoughts linger on the disquieting impression that Gamzee left on you, you make your way back to your room and are in equal parts surprised and _instantly furious_ when you find that you have a visitor, a particularly unwanted and uninvited visitor, waiting for you with his fucking feet up on your desk and one of the tools he’d used to fix your husktop for the second time the day before – a small, thin screwdriver – being idly, carefully, _almost_ clumsily rolled between his fingers.

You stop in the doorway and stare at him. He stares right back, unflinching as always, deliberately nonplussed as always, and you resist the violent urge to pitch something across the room at his face.

“What… the nooklicking _fuck_ are you doing in here?”

His eyebrows lower toward the upper rim of his glasses in such a way to suggest that he’s narrowing his eyes at you. You can’t say for sure. Those glasses make him fucking _impossible_ to read.

“We’re gonna have a feelings jam, Karkat,” he drawls, tossing the tool in his hand onto the table. The sharp resulting clatter is too loud against your walls. “You and me, we got some talking to do.”

“Pretty sure we’ve BEEN talking way more than I’m already comfortable with,” you bite back, because you’re stubborn and he makes you mad. “Get the fuck out of my room.”

“Nah,” he replies brashly and simply. “Nothing doing, man, I know you’ve been up to something the past few days and I stopped pushing you to tell me what it is, but you know…” He removes his feet from the table, rests them back on the floor. “You know, I was just walking, aimless wandering, bored, when suddenly the Mayor comes out of fuckin’ nowhere all flailing and nervous and shit. Guy’s a total spaz so I didn’t think a whole lot about it at first but turns out, he is only REALLY nuts when he’s trying to get a point across.”

You can almost see where this is going. You’ve had a couple of extremely brief encounters with him. You don’t let on to that, though; instead, you hold your ground and challenge him with the narrowing of your own eyes. “And what exactly is _your_ point, Strider?”

“ _My_ point is that it might be real annoying reading into his damn charades all the time but he’s good at makin’ you understand what he’s trying to say.” He leans back in your seat, crosses his arms, pointedly lifts one eyebrow. “He took me through the whole stock of food that he’s been trying to keep under control, man. Little OCD bro actually lead me by the damn hand like a kid and _literally_ showed me, shelf by shelf, what we’re supposed to be rationing so _all_ of us, himself included, have a share because we gotta make that shit last for two more years.”

Now you wish you’d planned it all out a little better. You say nothing. But you DO make a point to keep your expression as neutral as possible, at least until he’s done.

“It took awhile, but I finally got what he was trying to tell me. And what he was telling me is that you’ve been like, hoarding food, man.”

Your hands have balled into fists at your sides without you even realizing.

The other eyebrow arches, and both are now lifted expectantly. “Are you? Is that true? ‘Cause if you are, no, no bueno, that’s not cool.”

You really don’t want to answer to someone like him. He is demanding in all the worst ways – almost snide about it, like he’s a bully pretending to be nice to a wriggler when he’s really about to start beating him around, like he’s _way_ too smart to even be trying to make sense out of how you’re doing something, like he’s trying to be your fucking Lusus, hands on his hips, extending custodian-level punishment.

You will not stand for that. The only one who could exert THAT level of authority over you was actually your Lusus, and he’s dead.

So, instead of explaining yourself, you take a step to the side, unblocking the door. “I want. You. To leave,” you say levelly, but you are _millimeters_ away from your boiling point. At this rate, you feel like you’re doing him a favour trying to keep your temper under control because with him, screaming gets nothing through. If anything it only fuels him to argue with you harder.

He barely hesitates before he rises smoothly to his feet, crosses the room, grabs the door handle, and slams the door shut, closing the two of you inside.

“Nope.” Always, always with the fucking self-righteous crossing of his arms, and he leans back against the door frame. “Not until I get some kind of explanation out of you because things have just been too goofy with you, for like the past week, and I’m sort of sick of it.”

“It’s none of your business to begin with!” you retaliate, giving in and raising your voice. But you realize the flaw in that argument just as you’re voicing it.

And, of course, he picks it up immediately.

“It’s my goddamn business when our FOOD is on the line, dumbass.” This whole time, he has been infuriatingly collected and calm, just as he always is, but now he’s starting to get mad. There’s a deep furrow forming between his eyebrows just above the bridge of his glasses and he’s raising HIS voice, too, and his whole posture just seems tense and unfamiliar. “I’ve been giving you guys the benefit and Idunno HOW much I’ve been trustin’ you but I’ve been making the effort and now, you’re just sneaking around and getting smelly and dirty and apparently stealing way too much food and your _mood_ is even off, man, you’re not even all that screamy anymore, just really fucking grouchy and sullen and it’s getting on my nerves.”

You can hear blood in your ears. It’s almost as loud as he is. You can’t tell if it’s anger or embarrassment or (probably) a mixture of both but he’s striking a cord in you, one that you’ve only let out in tiny doses so far because SOMETHING in your brain told you that dumbing down your anger was going to make you less conspicuous when in reality, it made you _totally fucking obvious_ and that makes you _so mad_ that you want to hit him, you _really_ want to hit him, your arm is actually trembling with the force of your restraint, because now that his dam is broken, he just won’t stop.

“You might _think_ you’re not acting any different but holy jesus fuck, dude, we ALL notice it and you’re just walking around pretending that it ain’t no thing or whatever.” He actually extends a finger, jabs it in your direction. “But it IS a thing because YOU are keeping a secret that involves something that the entire fucking group needs, and I can take your mood swings and your secrets and all, I don’t fucking care, you could be hiding a harem for all the shits I give, but when you start getting selfish is when I say _no_ , dude, just fucking _no_.”

His voice is still steady, even despite the slight raise in volume, and you have no idea how in the fucking world he has managed to not _actually_ yell at you.

But you, you spill over.

“ _Get OUT of my ROOM you INTRUSIVE FUCKING ASSHOLE_.”

You have to admit that it feels good to do it. You haven’t yelled like _that_ in weeks and it loosens something taut and tense in your chest.

But Dave isn’t biting. “ _No_ ,” he repeats, and this time his finger actually jabs _against you_ , right into the center of your chest. “Fuck you, Karkat, I’m not leaving until you tell me what the _fuck_ is going on.”

Maybe it was the unexpected brazenness in his attitude, or maybe it was actually the fucking sharp finger trying to drill a hole right fucking through you, but something, _something_ snaps and instead of even trying to wrangle yourself back down and instead of TRYING to settle things the way you have been for too long, you let your restraint fall from your fingertips and you send a fist flying into his jaw.

You don’t take into account how fast he is.

You connect and it feels _so damn good_ , better than you were thinking it would, but before you have a chance to withdraw, one of his hands wraps itself tightly around your wrist and something jams into your shoulder so hard that you’re knocked off-balance, not fully backward but _around_ , your body flipping to face the opposite direction of the door as your back is slammed against the wall just beside it.

And there’s Dave, hand still gripping your wrist, elbow firmly against your shoulder, forearm lodging itself across your collarbones. He’s, what, a teenager in human years? Around your age, technically? But he’s fucking strong. His strength is the kind that’s not showy in his wiry limbs. It’s the type that’s wound up in smaller muscles like a spring that can snap forward with a _surprising_ amount of force behind it.

You wish you could admire it.

Your pride won’t allow that.

Instead, you give in to your instincts and you fight against him, trying to pry his hand off of your wrist with your free one, and while you DO nearly manage to get his fingers to open almost as much as you need them to, he’s not so keen on getting all of the fucking digits snapped by you today so all he has to do is shift his arm up, just a little, and it becomes a borderline-dangerous pressure against the base of your throat.

He can’t be serious.

Either he’s too used to strifing or genuinely loves it or both, because there’s the slightly upward tilt at one corner of his mouth like he didn’t have this planned but he’s _damn well okay_ with the idea of carrying it out, maybe even because he’s wanted to for awhile. And he’s still relatively calm, fuck, you don’t know how he’s managing to do that, _how_ can someone be this centered while he’s got you against a wall with his arm against your neck, _how_.

He seems like he wants this fight. He isn’t showing any signs of withdrawing or trying to resolve it. He seems serious.

But you can be serious, too. If it’s a strife he wants, a strife he’ll fucking get. You may be shorter than he is, only by a little, but you don’t have to have JUST build and power over him to turn any tables.

You _could_ go for the bulge and you consider it momentarily, but he catches the very quick flicker of your eyes and immediately guards himself, shifting his posture a little by pivoting his hips slightly to the side, blocking a blow there with his thigh. _Fuck_ , that was your best (and most vindictive, honestly, that sort of hit is not an easy one to recover from) shot, so for now you’ll just have to resort to using what you were born with to at the very LEAST get you out of this particular position.

Your hand, still playing at his fingers, drops to the meat of his forearm and you let yourself dig in, just a little, just enough, with the tips of your claws.

He grunts, hisses, wrenches his arm back (you feel the sick, very slight pull against your fingers as they dislodge, and it’s _so disgusting_ and _so satisfying_ ) and while he’s distracted, you use the window of opportunity to lurch away from the wall and try another swing at him, because the fucker was threatening to choke you and even if he has no intention of any long-term damage, this is just in the moment, just a strife, it’s _still_ enough to raise your defenses and push you to retaliate.

Unfortunately for you, he’s still too fast.

How he does what he does next, you haven’t the fucking _faintest_ idea, because he does it so quickly that your brain is left lagging behind and struggling to catch up with you. One second you’re throwing your second punch and the next, something hooks itself into the tender backs of your knees and your entire body buckles and crumbles like rags. But just before your back hits the floor, you turn at the last minute and the arm that had been attempting a punch manages to find itself around his neck.

You bring him right the fuck down with you.

Now you’re stuck, and your positioning is the most painful kind of awkward with you on your back and Dave’s head in a lock under your arm and his legs on either side of you to keep your hips and thighs from moving and one of his hands forcefully pushing down on your shoulder to keep you grounded. You feel like that part might have been accidental and you’re bitterly glad that he showed a little bit of clumsiness through his arrogance. You’re both in that really uncomfortable stage of breathing loudly but not quite heavily and the ‘fight’, if it can even be constituted as an actual fight, is at a momentary standstill.

He must be on high alert because you finally take the initiative to knock this stupid shit off, you shift and he instantly takes it as another advance and the pressure at your shoulder strengthens.

Interesting how the same hand that is strong enough to keep the upper left side of you immobilized was also gentle enough to piece your husktop’s delicate inner workings back together. Interesting and strange and what the _fuck_ are you thinking about that for.

You’re both stubborn and neither one of you want to be the one who backs down first but at the same time, you’re also just… _in_ this position and nothing is happening. At first, you were both so focused on what the next tactic would be from the other, but now you’ve made the mistake of actually looking at one another. The tension is rising but surprisingly, _somehow_ , both of you are gradually relaxing. Your hold on his neck has loosened, and his hand feels more like it’s just resting now, instead of pushing.

You narrow your eyes at him and slowly, cautiously withdraw your arm.

He does the same with his hand.

“Get off me,” you say when you realize that while trying to get a better hold on you, he’s practically sprawled himself across your lower body. This is particularly frustrating for you because not only do you feel like you hate him so purely right now, but the weight of him feels good. Unfamiliar, but good.

Which is why you need him _off_ of you, right fucking now.

He hesitates, for whatever reason that you are not sure of, so to get your point across you glare up at him and growl “ _Get off_ ,” giving your legs a quick, sharp, impatient jerk and maybe you only meant for it to get your point across but he’s apparently still highly defensive. In his mind it's another threat, and his knee-jerk reaction is to get BOTH of his hands on your shoulders this time and literally slam you back down against the floor so hard that the back of your skull hits it, too, and for a second your head feels a little fuzzy.

_Fuck_ whoever trained him how to fight like this. _Fuck_ them and _fuck_ the fact that he paid such close attention to them.

“Strider, fucking _what the fuck_ ,” you spit at him, screwing your eyes shut because the stupid nooklicker just gave you a _goddamn concussion_ , and you start to say something else, something along the lines of actually _calling_ him a stupid nooklicker, but you only really get as far as ‘You stu’ before you can’t speak anymore because something is on your mouth.

Another mouth is on your mouth.

_Dave’s_ mouth is on your mouth.

And the first thing that you think, shit for brains that you are, is _I’m not dead, why the fuck is he trying to revive me._

He’s not trying to revive you.

What he’s doing is WILDLY inappropriate. You aren’t necessarily disgusted by it, because you learned a long time ago that this kind of thing (kissing, specifically) is a fairly common occurrence between individuals who do not like one another. And _jegus_ you are so pitiful and sad – _because_ it’s not necessarily out of the ordinary and you DO, in fact, VERY strongly dislike Dave on multiple frustrating levels, you actually allow yourself the barest moment of reciprocation. It almost comes to you instinctively; you are such a fucking pathetically tactile creature when it comes right down to it and you realize that you’ve forgotten, you’ve forgotten _so quickly_ how good a kiss no matter the reasoning behind it actually feels. His cape is a cage of red hanging around you, draped like a blanket across his shoulders, and there is enough force behind his lips to make it all unexpectedly and confusedly _satisfying_.

Of course, the initial moment leaves just as quickly as it came to you. When you start to regain your clarity, your own mind reminds you that the two of you are _not_ involved in a quadrant. The act in itself feels nice, sure, but the inappropriate aspect stems from the fact that when those who don’t like each other kiss, they are typically locked in a Kismesissitude.

The only quadrant that you have agreed upon presently has been your Moiraillegiance with Gamzee.

It now suddenly and loudly occurs to you that this entire time, you have been tiptoeing along the lines of developing caliginous feelings for Dave, and you were so wrapped up in your own annoyance with him that you didn’t even see it happening.

You forcefully turn your head to the side, severing the contact without warning, and try to ignore the dizziness that follows the movement. You’re going to have one hell of a bump (and, no doubt, an accompanying headache) later. You’re glad that your hands are still at your sides because you can feel a slight tremble in them. You can’t say for sure if it’s adrenaline or nervousness or _what_ , but you’ll be fucked if you’re going to let him see either from you.

“Knock it off,” you snap. “You’re choosing a really fucking shitty time to pull something like this.”

You get nothing in response. He’s still looking damnably blank because of those glasses, but his lips are parted in a way that suggests he’s a little shocked by what he just did. Or confused, probably just as confused as you are, like he’s asking himself over and over _why did I do that_ and he had nobody to blame but himself because YOU sure as shit didn’t make the first move.

“Why do you care so fucking much, Dave?” you demand because you’ve been wanting to and you can be a real asshole sometimes and this little window of uncharacteristic shellshock from him is too perfect an opportunity to pass up. You seize it instantly and viciously, when his guard is down, because THAT is how you fucking fight. “What the _fuck_ is it even to you what I do in my own spare time while we’re stuck here or why I’m taking food?”

He frowns at that; you can tell clearly even with the glasses in the way. “Hey, the food IS my business,” he reminds you rather curtly. “It’s not just YOURS.”

“Thanks for the _hundredth fucking reminder_ , shithead, whatever, forget the damn food then.” His talent for getting under your skin got old very fast, and it’s clearly not going to be stopping anytime soon. The implications of him ‘getting under your skin’ in more than one way, in that vein, SHOULD be a pretty instant cause for alarm but you are _so frustrated_ with him right now that it doesn’t really occur to you just yet. “Everything else has NOTHING to fucking do with you.”

“How am I supposed to believe that?” He releases your shoulders completely, finally, and sits up straight, his arms crossing over his chest ( _always_ , is it a fucking tic or what), a knee still on either side of you. It figures, this is what he wants to talk about right now, and not the fact that he just initiated a kiss with a troll. _Humans_. “Way I see it is you gotta kinda prove to me that it has nothing to do with us ‘cause for real, sometimes shit spills over and I can see a personal issue becoming a group issue _fast_ if you’re not careful.”

“I don’t have to prove _shit_ to you.”

His lips (oh now you’re looking at them, what the fuck) flatten into a line.

“Don’t fucking look at me like that. And, actually, I think YOU owe me an explanation now, because what the fuck was that kiss just about.”

He nearly blanches but he keeps his composure. The arms across his torso seem to tighten a little. “Yeah Idunno sorry about it,” he finally says. “Accident.”

“Okay. Fine. Good. Now why are you still sitting on me.”

He wordlessly straightens up to a standing position and shifts back so that he’s not actually straddling you anymore. He surprises you a little by offering you his hand, but you’re still too irritated with him to accept the truce so openly so you half-heartedly slap it away and hoist yourself up to your feet on your own.

You find that you can’t look at him properly. You opt for a spot on the floor instead. You are making your discomfort pretty apparent, but you don’t have the capacity to be self-conscious right now.

“Get out.”

He doesn’t.

Instead, he moves in toward you and you’ve barely a second to react before your back bumps the wall behind you and his mouth is crushing itself against yours again. You give in to it much easier and more quickly this time because he’s already forcefully breached the threshold and it’s probably been a pretty long time since either of you have had this much physical contact and you’re _stuck_ here for two more years and it feels _surprisingly good_ to have someone pushing into you this way, it feels _really, really good_. You hate yourself for it, hate yourself for curling your hands into the fabric of clothing over his ribcage, hate yourself for using it to drag him in closer and hate yourself for reciprocating freely but you can’t help it. You feel like this is something you _absolutely should not_ be doing, you’ve been AGAINST decisions like this your entire life, but it only makes the fact that you’re allowing it to happen that much more exciting and you hate yourself for THAT, most of all.

You hate him just as equally. You hate him for igniting _whatever_ the fuck this is in you in the first place and you hate him for how much you’re enjoying it and how much HE seems to be enjoying it, and you suppose that’s acceptable enough because hating him is the point, here, and hating him IS, technically and culturally speaking, making all of this _okay_ , even though it really doesn’t _feel_ okay.

He’s the one who wrenches away this time, and he doesn’t even stop to look at you. He breaks the connection, breaks the haze that you had been drifting into, breaks everything, and leaves. He just leaves.

He’s gone, and you’re left slumping against the wall and trying to catch your breath again, and worst of all you’re feeling like out of all of the holes you’ve been digging yourself into over the past week alone, you just started in on the deepest and darkest one yet.

And Dave Strider is the one who handed you the fucking shovel.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a human who pisses you off so easily, he is _attractive_. He is an attractive person and you are attracted to him and you’re stuck, holy Matriorb, you are so, so trapped.
> 
> As if on cue, like the fucker can sense what you’re thinking about, his voice breaks the tense silence of the room. “So. The thing that happened.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More smooches ahead. Those crazy dudes.
> 
> You are ALL AWESOME, this hit count is staggering me. And thanks to those who've left really nice comments! That kind of stuff is really cool to come back to. :D
> 
> * * *

You run into Dave accidentally the next day, on your way to get something for _yourself_ for a change, passing by him as you move in opposite directions down the hall leading to where the food is stored. He’s got his headphones in and you fall victim to the _dumbest_ fucking assumption in the history of all dumb fucking assumptions that if someone has sunglasses on, they can't see you because you can’t see their eyes. You watch him pass by you and it doesn’t even occur to you until after you’re in the pantry that he was most likely watching you the entire time too, without you knowing it. 

Goddamnit.

You tried to convince yourself that you weren’t going to dwell on or even really _think_ about what happened in your room the day before, but unfortunately it was just wasted brain cells because the entire time you were telling yourself that garbage, you were thinking of it, anyway. You make some really bad choices sometimes but you’re not _ignorant_ ; you realize perfectly well that you have just gotten yourself into A Situation. 

Especially considering you don’t think about possible repercussions as much as you think about how good he smelled, for a human.

Surprisingly, and to your relief, the next few days after that continue on uneventfully. You’re torn on how you feel about it; on one hand nothing new or big happening means that nothing is really wrong, but on the other, you find yourself feeling like you need to clear the air with Dave because _whatever_ that was probably shouldn’t happen again. You’re far too close to quadrant territory and you know for a fact that humans just don’t fucking understand it. You go about your own business and he goes about his – you don’t know for sure what else he does in his spare time other than writing shitty words to his shitty raps but you busy yourself in bringing smaller portions of food to Gamzee. 

Visiting with him turns out to be a good distraction because he seems fine now, but he is MUCH smarter than anyone gives him any credit for because he picks up _instantly_ that something is bothering you (“You got too many motherfuckin’ bubbles in your think pan, huh, brother?”) and you have to lie to him like an asshole, tell him that you’re fine, don’t worry, just tired. Talking about Dave in general to Gamzee would be a bad decision in itself – talking to him about the fact that sloppy, angry makeouts were a thing that actually happened would be its own entirely different monster, and it’s a monster that you do not want to go up against right now.

So, you keep quiet about the whole situation. And you and Dave continue to tiptoe around one another.

As expected, fates from multiple different beliefs and multiple different universes seem hellbent on testing you lately because now that the two of you have unofficially and wordlessly agreed upon distancing from each other for a little while, your husktop starts to act up again.

This time, it’s the keyboard. The screen still flickers every so often, but you have fucking _perfected_ the type of smack that gets it working again. The keyboard is _completely_ different territory and you have no clue what could possibly be causing your ASDF keys to stop functioning.

After twenty minutes of banging repeatedly on said keys, cursing the computer as colourfully and loudly as you can, and taking an extended break to massage the entirety of your scalp in frustration, you note that Dave is actually on his messaging system. You come down to a choice – you can either seek him out for help and expose yourself to the potentially _painfully_ awkward position of facing him and his glasses and his blank expression and those _fucking lips_ or you can message him for help from the comfort of your balled-up, knees-to-chest position in your seat and stay right the fuck where you are.

It seems like a no-brainer, at first.

 

** \-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling turntechGodhead [TG] \-- **

**** CG:   TRIER  
CG:   PROBLEM.  
CG:   BIG N ERY TUPI PROBLEM.  
TG:   uh  
CG:   I HTE TO O THI BUT YOUR HELP I CTULLY PRETTY UCKING CRUCIL RIGHT NOW.  
CG:   THE KEY RE NOT WORKING.  
CG:   THE KEY  
CG:   UCK  
TG:   dude are you hammered or what  
CG:   UCK YOU, NO.  
CG:   MY KEYBOR I UCKE UP.  
CG:   KEY UNER “QWER” WONT WORK. ONT KNOW WHY. IT TRTE RNOMLY. I TRIE RETRTING BUT THT INT O HIT.  
TG:   oh my god  
TG:   incredible  
TG:   type out your name  
CG:   RE YOU UCKING KIING ME  
CG:   IM COMING TO YOU OR HELP, HOLE, NOT TO JOKE ROUN.  
TG:   dont call me a hole chump  
CG:   WHY M I EVEN BOTHERING.  
CG:   WHT UCKING HITTY LOW-GRE GRBGE HVE I BEEN MOKING TO THINK THT BRINGING THI PROBLEM TO YOU W GOO IE.  
CG:   I M LITERLLY JUT NONENICLLY UCKING TYPOING T YOU, HOW I THI EVEN HELPFUL.  
CG:   YOU RE GOMN PIECE O HIT OR THINKING THT THI I NYTHING OTHER THN UCKING BRINNUMBINGLY IRRITTING, I JUT NEE YOU TO GET UP HERE N UCKING IX MY PROBLEM OR ME BECUE YOU O NO WRONG N I M JUT BUCKETLICKING WTE O LEH WHO CNT O HIT OR HIMEL, I THT WHT YOU WNT TO HER, WILL THT CONVINCE YOU ENOUGH TO RG YOUR RROGNT EL-RIGHTEOU TO MY GOMN ROOM OR IVE UCKING MINUTE TO CTULLY PROVE YOUREL NYWHERE NER UEUL.  
CG:   RE YOU CONVINCE YET OR HOUL I LICK YOUR UCKING HOE WHILE IM T IT.  
CG:   YOU HEINOULY GREVIOU UCKING PRICK.  
TG:   oh my god i cant breathe  
TG:   dont gotta lick my fucking hoe man whatever that means i got you  
TG:   the only thing i need to give you the green light for more of my technological magic  
TG:   is for you to type out your name  
CG:   OH MY GO  
CG:   VE  
CG:   UCK YOU N UCK YOUR TWITE IE O WHT I CTULLY UNNY.  
TG:   the only thing standing between you and typing the right way ever again  
TG:   you can end this chat right now  
TG:   rely on your voodoo speak for the rest of whatever  
TG:   no skin off of my back  
TG:   i got other things to worry about  
TG:   brutal fucking beats to whoop down like pog slammers breakin up the pile  
TG:   sick sick fires to treat with some fda approved strider rx you feel me  
TG:   all you have to do to change my mind  
TG:   is just type your name  
TG:   once  
TG:   a simple request in exchange for what could possibly be another two years of decently translated communication on this rock  
TG:   come on man  
TG:   dont leave a brother hanging  
CG:   KRKT.  
TG:   im so proud of you

** \-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \-- **

 

-  -  -

 

You are in an irritable disposition, staring at the fucking door like any moment now a bomb is going to go off on the other side of it and decimate everything that you have grown over the past year to hold close as ‘comfortable’. It hasn’t been easy establishing a feeling of comfort on this meteor, so far. You, of all people, should know better than to feel anxious over relocating yourself from a place of familiarity to something that you cannot control. This thing is moving, with or without your permission, and it’s carrying you to a new game session that you obviously can’t predict the outcome of.

Yet, the anxiety is still there.

Whether it has everything to do with the eventual arrival to your destination or the fact that Dave is currently on his way up to your room again to play IT Guy, _again_ , you can’t say.

You’re not nervous. You’re not nervous at all.

Anxious and nervous are not the same thing. They are cousins in the same family, not siblings.

You pass the time until you hear the single, half-assed knock by idly pushing the keys that aren’t working, hoping that somehow they will start to function again out of nowhere and you won’t actually need Dave’s help. And when that knock comes, you don’t even have a second to speak up before the brazen asshole is pushing his way into your room like it’s fucking his room, too. The invasion of privacy has your skin crawling.

“Way to ask permission, jerkoff.”

“Hey,” he replies, nonplussed by your abrasion and perfectly casual as he approaches your desk. “Now what did you do to it.”

“I didn’t do _anything_ ,” you mutter defensively, pushing out of your seat so that he can take it. You can feel that your patience is waning pretty quickly, and you are more than willing to let him do his work as fast as possible. Right now, he is both an annoyance and a distraction – neither of which you’ve been particularly looking out for today. “Like I said, it started randomly.”

He smirks the slightest bit as he drops into your chair. “Is that what the fuck you were saying?”

You roll your eyes at him impatiently. “Just tell me what’s wrong with it, _goddamn_ , do you really have to keep pointlessly digressing?”

He turns to glance up at you with a lifted eyebrow. “Man, you are like a living landmine lately, I never know when I’m gonna step on you the wrong way.”

“There’s no wrong way to step on a landmine, dumbass. You explode either way.”

_Now_ he smirks again. You’re starting to get the feeling that he genuinely enjoys getting a rise out of you just for the fun of it. “If you’re allowed to be pointlessly literal, I’m allowed to pointlessly digress. We’re square.”

He turns back to your husktop and you consider smacking him in the back of the head.

You don’t know what he’s doing because it’s sort of beyond you and also he’s blocking your path of vision, but before you can stop yourself you’re looking at him, like really looking at him, eyes following the slender curve of the back of his neck as it leads down into the collar where his cape begins, then flicking over his shoulder to watch his hands as they so gently tip your computer up to peer at the bottom of it and you realize something, something actually kind of awful. For a human who pisses you off so easily, he is _attractive_. He is an attractive person and you are attracted to him and you’re stuck, holy Matriorb, you are so, so trapped.

As if on cue, like the fucker can sense what you’re thinking about, his voice breaks the tense silence of the room. “So. The thing that happened.”

Your stomach twists almost violently. Ah. You totally thought you had this, too. You definitely thought you were ready to slam this subject on the table and hash it out with him like a man but now that you’re watching him like some stupid black-crush fucking goon, you have suddenly lost the will to want to discuss _anything_ with him. What you would _actually_ much prefer is him quietly piecing all of your broken fucking stupid problems back together and leaving. You want that more than anything.

But Dave, Dave is difficult, even when he’s not trying to be.

“Yeah,” you respond lamely, and your voice comes out sounding much more nauseated than you intend.

“Sorry about that.”

Dave is usually pretty laid back, even _you_ have to suck it up and admit that virtue of his, but you don’t think that you’ve ever seen him actually _humble_ before and apologizing for a mistake ( _mistake_?) without a beat.

You’re a little off-guard as you watch him stretch across the desk to grab the screwdriver he’d left there a few days back. “Uh. Okay.”

He starts removing the small screws out of the bottom of your husktop. “Don’t sound so forgiving or anything, jesus.”

“What the fuck do you expect me to say? I don’t give a shit, do whatever.” …did you really just try to play it off like that? You immediately regret your wording when his movements momentarily halt. You try to recover. “More than anything I’m fucking confused as to why you’d apologize for THAT and not for almost choking me.”

He keeps working, but he doesn’t have anything of weight to retaliate with. “I guess I could be sorry about that too.” He gingerly eases the bottom of your husktop off and sets it aside. “It’s worth reminding that you threw the first punch though, bro.”

“You antagonized me.”

This isn’t an intentional deviation from the subject on your part, but that’s kind of what it does anyway.

He snorts softly as he peers into the body of your computer. “You antagonized me into antagonizing you.” He dips his fingers into the spot he just opened; you can’t see exactly what he’s doing. “Shit, I could do this kinda argument all day, try me.”

You don’t want to.

Instead, you exhale loudly, irritably, shoving your hands into your pockets. “No thanks.” And then, under your breath, “Fuckin’ bulgesucker.”

He doesn’t catch that. He continues poking and prodding around and doing shit that you can’t see even when you try to inconspicuously peer over his shoulder. When he starts putting the computer back together and putting the little screws into place, you lean forward expectantly. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What’s the problem?”

“I’m actually not sure. I think you just fucked it up with a tantrum or something.”

“Hey, fuck you, I don’t take my aggression out on my husktop.”

“Uh huh.” He finishes screwing in the last one and gently flips the husktop back into its proper position. He opens it to power it up. “I fiddled with a few things, not sure if I did anything worth a damn, though. We’ll find out.” He cranes his neck around to look at you. “You got compressed air or someshit? Or even just like, a straw? Might as well flush out what we can in case that’s not helping.”

You sigh again, tell him to hold on, and for the next few minutes you are scouring through your belongings looking for something adequate enough to blow any dust from under your keys. If THAT was the only issue, you swear to yourself that you are _actually_ going to break the computer by smashing it over Dave’s head. You reason that his skull is thick so really, most of the damage will happen to the husktop, but it’ll still feel good.

You finally find a goddamn straw (you don’t bother to remember how you got it or why you have it because who actually cares) and shuffle back to your desk to find that Dave has been trying to test the keyboard out.

By messaging Kanaya on your behalf.

 

** \-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling grimAuxiliatrix  [GA]  \-- **

**** CG:   teting teting one two three  
CG:   uck relly none o tht worke  
CG:   mn oh well  
CG:   i trie  
GA:   Karkat  
CG:   hi  
GA:   Are You Ill  
GA:   Do You Need Help With Something  
CG:   nh i got thi  
CG:   thi hit i chilply  
CG:   jut chillin like villin  
CG:   hngin with my goo rien mr broken ucking computer  
CG:   jut the two o u  
CG:   we cn mke it i we try  
GA:   I Am Not Sure How I Am Supposed To Be Responding To This Conversation  
CG:   hhh h h nh ont y wor  
CG:   huh now  
CG:   thi i uner control  
CG:   i got thi like og got bite  
CG:   got thi like boxer got ight  
CG:   got thi like i int got no right  
CG:   yeh got thi like wr got plight  
GA:   This Is Dave Isnt It  
CG:   hell no my nme I krkt  
CG:   tht right  
CG:   KRKT  
CG:   i like to preten tht i m the leer n i rule everyone  
CG:   n tht i m the ret n bet  
CG:   (wow thoe wor uck without thee key wht the uck i ret bet even)  
CG:   i m the mot enitive ue  
CG:   i m jut gint puywillow my rien  
CG:   with my ot hir n my little nugget horn  
CG:   how cute n ectionte i m  
CG:   i love ll living creature  
CG:   like bbie  
CG:   n kitten n puppie  
CG:   jut give them ll to me  
CG:   let me hug them  
CG:   holy uck ull ucking entence  
CG:   oh my go  
CG:   the only ull entence tht i cn ever write gin i  
CG:   “let me hug them”  
CG:   i cn lo write oontz oontz oontz without trouble oh my go  
CG:   let me hug them oontz oontz oontz  
CG:   o you know wht thi menngkjhjnvvvvvvbnvb  
CG:   GHRTXCJNK  
GA:   Are You Pranking Me  
GA:   Is That What This Is  
CG:   ORRY KNY  
CG:   VE THINK HE O UNNY  
CG:   WHEN RELLY HE JUT HUGE OUCHBG  
CG:   JKLTJHJJJKKKK KNOCK IT O LKGHJGJHJK’’’’’///  
CG:   ‘’L  
CG:   ‘’’’LLKL’  
CG:   ‘  
GA:   What Are You Two Even Doing  
CG:   ORRY MY COMPUTER I BROKEN, OME KEY ONT WORK NYMORE  
CG:   VE W UPPOE TO IX IT  
CG:   INTE HE TOLE IT N HRE YOU  
CG:   WOW THT OENT EVEN LOOK LIKE NYTHING.  
CG:   NYWY IM INE N VE I UCKINH PRICK JUT IGNORE OR NOW.  
CG:   JKVBVJKB

** \-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling grimAuxiliatrix  [GA]  \-- **

 

You _really_ need to stop forgetting about his reflexes. Every single time you manage to wrangle the keyboard back into your possession, you’re forced type as fast as you can before he bounces back from your last shove and has his dirty nubby human fingers all over yours on the keys just fucking _everything_ up. He did _nothing_ to fix the problem that you initially needed him for and now he’s just playing around with your goddamn possessions like they half belong to him, too.

Of course you only get built up to reacting more and more aggressively the more he tries to confiscate your husktop (which is still very private for you, he’s fucking lucky you even let him TOUCH the goddamn thing to fix it), and by the time you finally manage to do some kind of damage control with Kanaya and get your hand on the top of the computer to snap it shut, you and Dave suddenly find yourselves in an _extremely_ uncomfortable position.

You had given him a particularly strong push away from your computer and you only managed to succeed in stalling him long enough talk for a second because the idiot tripped on his own two fucking feet. You got out what you could, but the _second_ his hand snaked around you to start fucking with the keyboard again, you slapped it away, closed the computer and turned yourself around to face him – to better deflect any further advances, you figured.

He’s fucking predictable; of course he was going to try again because he’s Dave, and he’s an _expert_ when it comes to purposeful annoying persistence. He’s stopped dead once you turn around, though, because The Uncomfortable Position happens, with the backs of your thighs against the edge of the desk and your hands gripping it on either side of you and Dave’s hands right next to yours like he was getting ready to _hop_ the fucking thing to get to your computer if he had to and his face only a _few fucking meager inches_ away. 

It was accidental. You know it was. Though you also have to ask yourself _just_ how confident you are about that assessment when you haven’t even openly _discussed_ at length that the two of you kissed before he’s going in for round two.

You decide that attraction, even the kind that is _solely_ physical, is fucking confusing. You didn’t even realize that you’d been curious to see if it would happen again, just as sudden and unprovoked as the first time, and you also didn’t realize that you _wanted_ it to happen again – not because you’re in love with the douchebag (oh god fuck _no_ ) or even flushed for him but because you DO find him attractive and you DID enjoy the last time he did this.

Look at you, trying to make sense of it all while it’s happening. Probably because you’re still in the process of telling yourself that it’s strictly physical contact and not emotional or relationship-building. And the longer he decides to let his lips linger against yours, the easier it is to convince yourself that, fuck it all, you _really_ want the physical contact and you’d take it from a fucking _cactus_ if it came on to you, at this rate.

It’s clear how uncertain the first time was as compared to this time, because he’s approached you with more confidence, like this time he isn’t fucking confusing himself and he _realizes_ what he’s initiating. You don’t know what it is, probably just an intense surge of previously undisturbed, cobwebbed hormones finally waking themselves up, but he’s being so insistent, and when his mouth moves you’re inclined to return the gesture, moving with him and against him and suddenly the edge of the desk is biting so sharply at the backs of your legs with his pushing forward that you shimmy yourself onto it and he takes the invitation and moves in closer and _holy actual and complete fuck_ what are you getting yourself into right now, control is slipping from your fingers and into his hair as you dig your hands up into it.

You don't know how much experience he has with this because yours is pretty minimal, but it gets to the point where you're both trying to breathe into one anothers' mouths, and his lip almost gets snagged on one of your teeth and you have to reposition your heads and figure out how to properly breathe through your noses. You eventually figure it out after slowing down a little, though, and honestly the gradual build back up is pretty exhilarating, because slowing down meant you both had a chance to get out of this and neither of you did.

He's the one to put a stop to it again, but this time its with a much more pleasant method. Instead of tearing himself away and leaving without so much as a glance back, he slows everything down again until he's able to back off without it being jarring or insulting. By now you're both breathing a little too hard, still through your noses like a pair of geniuses, and when he shifts back you look at him; he looks _perfect_ with his hair messed up and his lips reddened and his typically pale skin is tinged with a red flush, a flush that is all too embarrassingly similar in colour to your own.

You watch each other for a moment. It drags on for a little too long and just as you are about to build up enough gall to reach out and drag him back, he takes in a long breath, takes a step back.

"Should, uh. Prob'ly go."

You feel your head nodding, numbly.

He jerks his thumb toward the door behind him awkwardly before he turns to walk to it. He does pause at the threshold, though, to look back at you - he lifts his hand to rub at the nape of his neck, and for a second you're struck by how _normal_ and unprovoked of a gesture it seems to be. You've never seen him do it before.

"Sorry about your computer and stuff."

Then he's gone. Again.

And you're still sitting on your fucking desk, staring after him like an asteroid is about to hit you and you have no idea what you should even be doing to brace against it and all you can think is _Fuck, I'm in trouble._


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After you've straightened up, dusted yourself off, and very carefully and methodically placed the grating back over the entrance to both secure and camouflage it, like always, you realize that you'd momentarily let go that bad feeling until you turn around and you stop short, halted jarringly by unexpected company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THINGS HAPPEN IN NEXT CHAPTER I PROMISE. For now, have some build up.
> 
> * * *

As the days pass, your encounters become more and more frequent, and the more frequent they become the less either of you are inclined to talk about it. He tried his hand at breaching the subject head-on by initially apologizing for it but you see how much good that did you; he apologized, you argued with him, and you wound up in the exact same position all over again.

The next few times are in your room again. It’s the most secluded area that you can think of (besides the room in the vents but that is _the_ most out of the question scenario you think has ever passed fleetingly and dismissively through your mind to date) and you’re starting to get the feeling that Dave is developing an association. He doesn’t ever come up to check on your computer or you or anything else; he comes up with only one purpose, and typically it doesn’t come with a warning beforehand.

Somehow, you’re fine with it.

It’s tricky, juggling Dave’s newfound somewhat disconnected attentiveness and having to look after your crazy vent-monster moirail. The trickiest part of it is keeping them away from one another, because you know the history and you know what Dave stupidly and unknowingly did. Dave would only continue to antagonize ‘the juggalo’ as he once referred to Gamzee as, and Gamzee would… probably want to kill him. He would probably do it quickly and right in front of you.

You _really_ don’t want to watch someone else die by Gamzee’s hand. Not even a little. It’s almost funny, though – if the two were any closer, you could swear that right now you’d be fucking Auspicing for them, but that is admittedly the last thing you want.

Like you _need_ any more quadrant drama right now.

In order to keep up appearances, and _really_ thankful that this newfound attachment that Dave has to your mouth has distracted him from further questioning on food and why you’d been taking so much, you fall into a routine of breaking your visits up with Gamzee by a few days. This works well for what you think is technically two weeks, telling time or dates during this trip has been really fucking ridiculous, but one of the next times you see him, something is… pretty noticeably different.

You have a really hard time admitting to yourself that he’s been teetering back and forth between totally okay and slowly unhinging again. You also have a hard time admitting that when he’s acting strangely, it scares you. Not just for yourself and not just for his own well being, but for everyone else on the meteor. 

This time, he seems to be _right_ in the fucking center of Okay and Not Okay. He perks up the smallest bit when you make your grand, scrambling entrance out of the mouth of the vent, but he doesn’t get up from his hunched sitting position against the far wall to help this time, nor does he even acknowledge the food that you’ve brought him. You struggle out of the claustrophobic nightmare and once you’re properly on your feet, you’re approaching _him_ with the food and cautious steps.

“Hey,” you greet him as gently as you can manage. “You look like shit, Gamz.”

He does. The bags under his eyes are fully visible through the caky, awful makeup that he STILL insists on smearing across his face and not washing off for days at a time. The weight of them is so obvious that it’s like there’s this gravitational field around him that is pulling his entire face down. He looks ragged and exhausted. It’s not hard to surmise that the past few days, for reasons unknown to you, have been pretty hard on him.

“Thanks, brother,” he says anyway. There isn’t much feeling behind his voice.

“No naps lately?” You bend to place the food on the floor, nearby. You know better than to demand that he immediately eat. You know better than to demand anything from him.

He shakes his head a little as you crouch down in front of him. You’re still not willing to sit on the floor, but you can tell he doesn’t need you standing over him like you’re more important than he is or something. 

“Head’s too jammed,” he replies simply and you nod a little with understanding that you don’t quite have. 

“Need to talk?”

He seems to consider it for a few seconds. He’s a creepy bastard and he’s been making you feel really unsettled lately, but he’s still important to you. You give him as long as he needs to make the decision.

“No, I don’t motherfuckin’ think so, bro,” he finally answers, and you try not to feel disheartened.

“Okay,” you settle instead. You shuffle a little closer carefully, without breaking your balance, and hesitantly reach out to touch his hair. He doesn’t flinch; that’s a good sign. It’s so matted and it feels like straw, it’s actually kind of disgusting, but if it settles him down and he likes it, you figure you can suck it the fuck up for a few minutes.

“What’s goin’ on in the outside world, my man?” he asks.

You shrug a little. “Not much of anything. My husktop keeps breaking down, but other than that…” You trail off, shrug again. What are you going to say to him? Nothing’s really been happening aside from you closely and diligently studying the anatomical intricacies of the human mouth, on a human you just really don’t like in general? Gamzee may be crazy, but he’s not stupid – he wouldn’t just think _Oh Dave and Karkat are hatekissing, that’s okay_ , he would mull it over and probably, given his track record with the guy, assume that Dave was in some part forcing you into it or something equally as disturbing. _Not_ the case, seeing as if anyone tried to push dominance on you in such a manner they would be missing both eyes in a matter of seconds, but trying to talk to Gamzee (not shooshing, not papping, but actually talking) while he’s all fucked up in a rage is damn near impossible, a gigantic fucking waste of time and breath.

You are happy that your room doesn’t have any grating in it. After your first gallivant into this nice metallic little shithole of a hideout, you’d scoured your room from top to bottom, wall to wall to be sure like a paranoid little wriggler.

Gog forbid Gamzee overhears the shit that's been going on in there lately. Or _sees_ it, for that matter.

It's not as though he wouldn't understand the fundamental nature of your actions - with anyone else, hell, he might even be willing to _condone_ them. It's not as though he hadn't partaken in intoxicated romantic pursuits before, either. The only problem that he would realistically have would be the company that you are currently sharing your own pursuits with.

_Your_ problem seems to be for the same reason. That, and a lack of a locked-in quadrant.

This is something that you sort of need to talk about soon. 

When he doesn't respond past anything more than a quiet, almost thoughtful hum and a nod, you hesitate for a moment before sighing and rising up out of your crouch. "Need some time alone? I don't mind."

You fully expect him to say no, to drag you back down and maybe even into his arms; he's been way pale-cuddly lately. You don't have a problem with it at all, truthfully, and you've even come to start expecting it.

To your surprise, he actually agrees.

"Yeah. Let a brother be for awhile."

Your eyes meet. You officially feel Awkward. 

He must catch on, because he clarifies, "Sometimes a guy just gotta be alone with his own motherfuckin' thoughts for a bit, you know? No worries, bro, I ain't kicking you out."

That makes you feel better, better enough to comply with his request. You give him a gentle departure, even dipping your hand to rub along his dirty hair one more time (he accepts it with the barest hint of a smile) before you turn to leave.

Your gut twists with a bad instinctive omen when you're halfway through the vent to get out. This is a particularly shitty feeling - not only are you suddenly dreading what's on the other end of the damn tunnel for no actual reason, but the dread is tapping your very, very slight claustrophobic tendencies on the shoulder and suggesting that it pay closer attention.

You scuttle the rest of the way through a little too quickly, not even really bothering to pay much attention as you engage in the complicated and never-graceful exit on the other side.

After you've straightened up, dusted yourself off, and very carefully and methodically placed the grating back over the entrance to both secure and camouflage it, like always, you realize that you'd momentarily let go that bad feeling until you turn around and you stop short, halted jarringly by unexpected company.

Dave's there. Dave's there with his shades on and his arms crossed, both typical, both familiar, but what's not familiar is the disapproving downward slope of his mouth as he stares you down, the Mayor at his side, glancing nervously between the two of you, his hands forming an uncertain, jittery steeple in front of his sash.

 

\- - -

 

He requests (it's more of a demand but you feel strange calling it a demand when his voice is so damn calm) to speak with you in private, and obviously that means your room.

You go into it unsure of what you're expecting (and you gave that asshole Mayor one _hell_ of a death glare as you trailed behind Dave past him, oh hell yes you did) but once that door is shut, the tension only thickens because he sits himself down at your desk without asking, turns in your chair to face you, and just… stares at you expectantly, like maybe he's wondering why you aren't on your goddamn hands and knees mewling for his fucking forgiveness or explaining yourself already.

You shrug at him like _okay what the fuck?_

"Do I really need to ask?" he replies and, you suppose, he doesn't. 

But you're a douche and you don't like him having his way, so you glower instead. "You could be asking me ANY question right now, Strider, out of, oh, a fucking _billion_?"

His expression hasn't changed yet and it's infuriating. "Don't be a passive aggressive dicksack, Karkat, and just tell me what's going on."

So you're back to this again.

You start to open your mouth, but he actually cuts you off.

"And before you start spewin' shit like it's not my business, just remember that now I fucking know where you're stashing all that food that the Mayor's been pretty much flat-out _watching_ you take."

You glower even harder, and AGAIN, he cuts you off before you can get a word in.

"And don't blame him either, because it was like pulling every goddamn tooth out of my mouth trying to FIRST convince him that snitching on you was okay, and SECOND figure out what the fuck he was getting at. He underestimated my patience for weird shit, I guess, because I stuck around until I understood every last little nuance." He pauses. Shrugs. "Well, sort of. The only thing I DON'T understand now is your side of the story because you keep refusing to 'fess up."

Now that he's interrupted you twice, you've lost _everything_ that you had planned on retorting with. Now, you're stripped down to the bare honest truth and you are literally fighting yourself tooth and nail against giving him _that_ much.

"Do we really have to talk about this right now?"

That was a HORRIBLE cop-out, and Dave knows it. He sniffs it out so efficiently that _Terezi_ would be fucking impressed, and he doesn't hesitate to pounce on it.

"Yeah we fucking do. So. Get talkin', because I don't really plan on dragging my fine ass out of this seat until I'm satisfied with what you tell me."

You say nothing. 

He takes in a long breath - it sounds like he's trying to keep his composure. He's doing a terrific job so far, as always.

"Karkat, are you smuggling food into that weird hole in the wall, yes or no."

You decide, yes or no games are much, much easier to stomach than having to think up and execute a decent conversation about how big a piece of deceptive, kleptomania-inclined shit you've been lately.

"Yes," you admit finally, raising your chin a little. Fine. You're going to confess to stupid shit, you might as well do it with honor.

"Cool, okay, now we have something. Is there someone besides you eating it because you're still scrawny and I will really not believe you a single fucking bit if you say no, yes or no."

Your neck feels like it's burning. "Yes."

"Someone is living in there."

"Yes."

"Is it the elusive juggalo guy? Annoying typer, likes to swear a lot?"

There is a VERY pregnant and very long pause before you finally manage a nearly-whispered, "Yeah."

He considers you and your information for a moment.

"Okay."

…what.

"Huh?"

"I said, okay." He shrugs. "Hell if I'm gonna be able to stop you if you're doing freaky deaky clown shit in the vents, that's all you buddy. I just wanted to get a honest fucking answer out of you for a change, jesus shitting christ."

You're suddenly gawking at him. "…all you wanted was a _confession_? After all the fucking badgering?"

"Sure why the fuck not."

You can't stand the sight of him right now, with his casual, collected demeanor and the almost snide, too-relaxed drawl to his voice or the way he's all sprawled out in _your_ chair like he owns it and is letting you borrow it out of generosity even though it's _your goddamn property_. You absolutely _can not_ stand the sight of him and that is EXACTLY why you find yourself crossing the room before you can stop yourself.

He tenses, though not by much, as your hands lift to grip either side of his face. The tension relaxes when you kiss him because he's sort of getting used to this by now, so instead of prolonging the uncomfortable question-answer game, he settles for leaning forward and up into your advances, immediately winding his arms around your waist and pulling you closer, so close that you are actually literally _forced_ into his lap to keep from snapping in half or falling over.

"Goddamnit, Dave," you grumble when you manage a small break in the kiss, but a second-long break is really the only time he gives you before he's back at it, trying to aim for your lips at first, but accidentally catching your chin, instead. He seizes the opportunity, true Strider Style, and uses it to explore the previously-uncharted territory of your neck for the first time.

And _everything_ in you immediately pushes into it like the feeling it's providing is actually saving your life right now.

You start to feel the light scrape of thin metal framing and polycarbonate against the sensitive skin over your throat and you huff with frustration, your hands falling to his shoulders to push him back a little.

"These fucking things," you mutter as you, without even thinking, lift your hands to grip them and slide them off. Your fingers just barely touch them when his hands are suddenly around your wrists in a near death grip, and you actually hiss because he squeezes so hard.

You have put distance between you and now you're watching one another. _You're_ wondering what the fuck his problem suddenly is, and even though his expression is hard to really gauge, as usual, there is a discernible flash of tentativeness in him, here, that reaches right into you and yanks on something.

Slowly, his grip loosens until his hands lower back to your waist.

You give him another beat to change his mind before you gently slide the glasses off of his face.

His eyes.

Holy actual… unbelievable fuck.

His eyes are the most morbidly beautiful things you've ever fucking seen in your entire miserable life. Red eyes. Maybe there's a little bit of russet brown tinge in there too, but they are DEFINITELY mostly red. His eyelashes are just as blonde as his eyebrows and his hair, which makes the colour of his eyes that much more intense.

You can't help it. You stare, and you fall into them breathlessly.

Until his squirms underneath you.

"Uh, dude."

You blink a few times, successfully Snapped Out Of It. "Uh? Sorry."

And you get the feeling that you've successfully ruined the mood.

His brow is furrowed in such a way that makes him look more nervous than upset, just a little, and holy _shit_ is it way fucking easier to read him when he's open and visible and _vulnerable_ without his ocular mask to hide behind.

You are in this so deep you can barely think straight. 

"Assure me a thing, okay?"

That comes out of nowhere, so you raise your eyebrows, lean forward the slightest bit.

"Idunno what you got going on with the clown but just… don't… do anything dumb, you know? Or let HIM do anything dumb."

"Motherfucker please, if there is any one fucking thing you need to trust me on and leave me alone about, it's anything with him."

He smirks a little. "Figured it'd be one of those Dave No Touchy things. I get the feelin' just by the weird way he's like, living in the walls and shit that he's probably an uncontrollable or something just as creepy." He pauses. "…uh, would he be in YOUR walls right now?"

"No," you reply curtly, because you were enjoying yourself and you fucked it up and now _he's_ fucking it up. Your eyes half-lid with unamused annoyance, but you try to get your point across by sliding one of your hands into the hair at the back of his head. "I already checked to make sure. No vents in here."

He seems to enjoy what your doing - he swallows a little too hard to be casual or natural - but he's moronic and persistent and _goddamn_ it just figures that the time when you really just want to kiss him completely breathless is when he wants to use his maw for other purposes like _talking_. "You looked EVERYWHERE right, because man, I'd really hate to be a reason for that guy to get all hot and bothered, that makes me a little queasy."

"Dave could you maybe actually fucking listen to me for a change, accept that I checked, and shut the _fuck up_ already?"

For now, it's the right amount of incentive that he needs and you finally fucking get your way for a change.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You are convinced that this is your favourite side of him – you like when his stance is like a rubber band pulled way, way too taut, you like the dangerously blank canvas of his facial features, and you like when he looks like he could be willing to kill you if you weren’t _you_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short but important. 8D
> 
> * * *

You start to realize, pretty rapidly, that you need to speak with someone you can trust about The Dave Issue. The Gamzee Issue is something that you’re going to have to deal with your own damn self, unfortunately, but that whole mess is a much deeper and more personal matter, anyway. Dave’s situation is quadrant-centric. You know for sure that if anyone is going to understand and lend honest advice, it’s going to be Kanaya.

You take your time to mull it over before you approach her with something because this is not exactly a situation that you take lightly. You tried to pass off your encounters with Dave as fleeting, hormonal things that didn’t really have a place anywhere, but they’ve been happening so frequently and growing increasingly more intense that you’re wondering if maybe there IS something you should be considering, here. The general human stance on relationships has always been one of those barely-knowns for you (up until now, you never really had any excuse to be even remotely interested at all), so you aren’t exactly sure how to proceed.

When you find Kanaya and ask her if she has a few minutes to talk, she immediately appears concerned and drags you off her makeshift respiteblock for privacy. 

It takes a little while, but eventually you let the entire situation unfold for her. Talking about it is actually far more awkward and difficult than you expected; letting down your emotional guard and unveiling any kind of genuine vulnerability to _anyone_ has never been your strong point, and Kanaya knows this. She takes it without judgment, listens closely and carefully, and when you’re done and wringing your hands in your lap and gathering the innards to glance up at her, she seems to be thinking the information over.

“I suppose the most important question to know the answer to is, have you spoken to him?”

“About which part, exactly? Us or quadrants or…?”

Kanaya shrugs her slender shoulders. “Either.”

You hesitate. “Well… not really?”

There is a subtle shifting in the muscles around her mouth; her lips almost press into a skeptical line.

“I know,” you concede without her needing to say a _goddamn_ word to you because the admittance suddenly made you feel really stupid. “It’s kind of hard, though, because every time we try we just wind up getting…” Er. “Sidetracked.”

She nods in understanding. “While I’m sure that’s a perfectly good reason _not_ to discuss the situation with him in the moment, there is always before or after, is there not?”

“That’s where the issue is, I think. I don’t think HE wants to talk about shit. I think he’s fine with what it is and talking about it will bring it to a level that he doesn’t want to face right now.”

“Then perhaps,” she offers after a beat. “it is best to leave him be about it? Unless you’re in a particularly urgent state about discussing it with him.”

“I, uh, am. Actually.” You go back to looking at the hands in your lap almost sheepishly. “I want something established, I hate the fucking floating around.”

“The vacillating,” she corrects, because fuck, yeah, that word describes what you were doing a lot better. Leave it to Kanaya to feed you some harsh reality as gently as she can.

“Yeah. That. I don’t want to do that. Especially with Dave, _especially_ since we’re sort of going to technically be living together for the next couple of years.”

Kanaya regards you coolly, but you can just imagine the gears in her head turning rapidly.

“Are you flushed for him?”

“ _No_ ,” you answer immediately. You feel your brow furrowing defensively and you make your best effort to relax and smooth out the muscles. “No, I’m not flushed for Dave.”

“Caliginous feelings, then?”

NOW is when you let out a long breath. It becomes an annoyed groan and you lean back in your seat. “In that respect, I’m completely fucking crazy about him.”

“Interesting,” Kanaya ponders, resting an elbow on her crossed knee, chin in her hand, fingers tapping thoughtfully along her jawline. “It seems to me that you may be causing your own confusion.”

Your eyebrows knit together. “How do you figure?”

“Well, Rose has been educating me on a lot of human customs, and you seem to be following along with Dave’s automatically, instead of respecting your own boundaries. Culturally speaking, we need something to prove that our partner in our chosen quadrant is somehow _worthy_ of that quadrant.”

She is totally and maddeningly correct, of course, and you have ALWAYS been relatively strict in that regard.  You think you see where she is taking this. Your moiraillegiance was very justly earned on both sides; there’s no reason why a kismesistude can’t work the same way.

“It sounds to me that you have been very blatantly pushing the boundaries of a caliginous agreement by entrusting him to make such intimate physical contact with you before he’s proven that he won’t use that closeness to snap your neck when you’re at your most vulnerable.”

This gets a pretty sharp reaction out of you. “Ha, um, Kanaya, I really don’t think Dave—“

“I know he likely won’t ever,” she clarifies, and leans back in her seat again. “But it’s always something that we need to watch out for. If you are indeed interested in Dave on a caliginous level and would like to seriously pursue a kismesistude with him, maybe you should challenge the both of you in a way that will _properly_ officiate your quadrant before any further physical gestures are allowed.”

“...you’re sort of a genius, Maryam.”

She smiles at you like she’s proud of you. “Just be careful. Not all humans are as knowledgeable and forgiving of troll customs and practices. The idea may be far lost on him.”

You dismiss the idea with a waved hand. “I’ll make it work. I’m smarter than he is, anyway.”

It was an attempt at a joke at Dave’s expense, but she wryly tightens her smile a little instead of laughing.

“How romantic.”

 

-  -  -

 

You’ve made your rounds to everyone, including the Mayor and _excluding_ Dave, announcing that for the next hour or two, the common area is absolutely one-hundred percent no fucking questions so don’t even CONSIDER asking any off limits to everyone who is not you or Dave. You are obviously met with skepticism but you push that this is a serious matter and to please, kindly, mind their own fucking business until you give the word that all is clear.

Eventually, there’s a resounding agreement to your persistence (probably out of sheer annoyance alone, but that’s fine, whatever fucking works), and you’re more than just a little proud of that.

You don’t have to wait long, either. The moment Dave’s stupid face comes around the corner from the hall, he jerks to a halt, one of his light eyebrows rising above the rim of his glasses.

Your sickles are out.

He doesn’t even ask. He doesn’t question it for even one single fucking hair of a second. His busted sword is in his hand faster than you can even blink but it’s not raised offensively. Although the arm that holds it has its muscles tensed and at the ready, he is making no immediate or obvious move to strike at you.

“What gives?” he asks you, and his voice is steady, almost genuinely inquisitive. You’re learning slowly that fights with Dave seem to be dangerously familiar and natural to him.

“I’m challenging you, faceache,” you reply.

He raises the sword just slightly. “Why?”

The lifting of his weapon is exactly what you wanted to see. His poise tells you that he WILL fight you without second thought, but he doesn’t really _want_ to until he gets an explanation. Your lack of one in response – instead, you raise your own weapons to the ready; that should speak louder than even _your_ perpetually ear-piercing voice could ever hope to – pushes him from tentatively ready to completely prepared. The sword’s positioning, even while broken, is handled with expertly channeled and confident ease. You are convinced that this is your favourite side of him – you like when his stance is like a rubber band pulled way, way too taut, you like the dangerously blank canvas of his facial features, and you like when he looks like he could be willing to kill you if you weren’t _you_.

You smile without actually meaning to, a reflexive reaction to the giddiness of your black-crush coming to its full and proper realization, and that smile is his only warning before you take a breath and push forward.

You are officially courting Dave Strider.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can’t stand it. He is actually _perfect_. He approaches you like you are a formidable and worthy opponent but at the same time, looks down on you like he WILL beat you and he WILL win any fight you want to pick with him. When he does get a blow in, he waits for you to recover _just enough_ to react to his next one. When you block him or successfully deal out your own damage, he accepts it and lets it fuel him a little harder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DOUBLEUPDATES. More makeouts but actually leading up to more important plot progression. 
> 
> You guys are still awesome, by the by. The comments alone are worth keeping this puppy going.
> 
> * * *

It is one of the best and most exhilarating fights of your life.

You shouldn’t be surprised by how easily you two are matched, but you are. Pleasantly so, actually. He is incredibly fast, and his jabs and movements are completely unpredictable. He spends the entire strife keeping you on your toes, you can’t _once_ let your guard down even for a second, and his strength _far_ surpasses yours.

However, while he has speed and strength, your reflexes seem to top his. Even though you’ve been slammed against pretty much every wall in the room and you’re _already_ bruising because he’s been hitting you with the flat side or hilt of his sword to do damage without slicing you, you can tell that he hasn’t been matched like this by someone in awhile. The look of surprise that crosses his face every time you block one of his blows (which has been pretty much every single one) is down-to-the-gut satisfying and you’ve managed to knick him, with a VERY calculated and precise aim, a couple of times. You would expect someone receiving a quick, shallow cut to react with anger during a fight, but Dave, he’s so _weird_ , he just hisses and then chokes out this weird little breathy laugh like he’s been at the sopor slime. Maybe it’s so strange to you because he spends most of his time outwardly disengaged from his emotions, and this one thing that he does, this little quirk, this reaction to being bested by his opponent temporarily, apparently opens up a part of him that he doesn’t have quite as much control over.

You find yourself going in for those little cuts purposely, just for that reaction alone.

You can’t stand it. He is actually _perfect_. He approaches you like you are a formidable and worthy opponent but at the same time, looks down on you like he WILL beat you and he WILL win any fight you want to pick with him. When he does get a blow in, he waits for you to recover _just enough_ to react to his next one. When you block him or successfully deal out your own damage, he accepts it and lets it fuel him a little harder.

Dave is perfect. Dave is your _perfect_ kismesis. There is absolutely nobody else in the entire fucking universe, in ANY fucking universe that you want right now because you two are just _so obviously fucking perfect_ for one another. This would be the black equivalent to ‘fitting together like puzzle pieces’ or whatever in a flushed relationship. You _can’t_ pass this opportunity up because you’re into it, HE seems into it, and you are so sure that you’re catching the vibe you want from him. You haven’t initiated a relationship like this in sweeps and even the past attempts had never felt as instantly successful as this has.

It’s strange to think that days ago you only liked him because he was a decent kisser and he fixed your computer a few times. Now, you’re losing your fucking mind over him and the sight of him and the way it feels with his weapon lodged against the two of yours and _ugh, god_. 

It’s hard to tell who comes out as the technical ‘victor’ – by the time the two of you need some kind of breather, he has you against a wall again with one arm holding you firmly in place and the jagged, broken edges of his sword inches away from your abdominal region. The moment your back hit that wall, you had the curved blade of one sickle poised around the small of his back and the other, the back of his neck. And you’re both standing there, panting, sore, sweaty messes in a _literal_ deathgrip of each others’ arms and you can’t _stand_ how perfect it is, _fuck_ , it’s almost scary.

“Truce?” he offers breathlessly and you consider him for a moment before nodding numbly.

You know that it’s coming. All three weapons seem to clatter to the ground at the same time as his arm releases you and both of his hands fall to your hips. Your hands are up into his hair again and you’re kissing him like he’s the only thing that will give you back the breath you lost during your fight and, shit, maybe he is, maybe that’s his purpose in all of this, to take your fucking breath away from you and give it right the fuck back, tenfold. 

You aren’t sure if it’s the same on his end, but this time is different for you – you are accepting him as an equal and now that things seem to be sliding into place with a potential quadrant, you are more willing to react and reciprocate appropriately. You have had several of these meetings with Dave up until now and every one of them have been physically great but emotionally lukewarm. Putting a name on it is more than enough to seal the deal for you. Instead of the meager responses you’d given him out of nervousness or uncertainty (mostly uncertainty) before now, you give him exactly what he’s seemed to be looking for this entire time.

You steel your own strength, and then use it to push forward, turning you around, switching your positions so that HIS goddamn back is being slammed against a fucking wall for a change and his lips stutter against yours, his breath being huffed out from the force. He doesn’t seem dissuaded, really, because he finds his ‘footing’, so to speak, pretty quickly and his arms wind around your waist and he drags you up against him and wow, this is quite possibly the closest either of you have allowed the other to be, so far. 

You’ve so obviously dropped your walls because now the entire world is suddenly flipped and, again, you’re the one being pushed against something. Damnit. You growl into his mouth, immediately attempt to push back because _fuck no_ he did not just take the dominance from you before you were ready to let him fight for it, but he’s just _too damn strong_ and his hands find your wrists to pin them, hard, next to either side of your head.

His mouth relocates itself to the side of your throat and the agitated noise you give him in response makes him laugh a little. “Shut the fuck up,” you hiss, but you tilt your damn head for him anyway because fuck it. It feels good, despite his smarmy attitude, and you’ll be damned if you make him stop now.

…and he has horrible timing. Just as you think that, just as you’re SURE that he’s going to keep going, he pulls away to drop his forehead against yours, breathing hard, his brow furrowed uncomfortably.

“Fuck, we gotta stop.”

Oh you could kill him.

“I hope you’re fucking kidding me,” you grit back, keeping your eyes open and seeing nothing but shades instead of eyes and _goddamnit_ , Dave, you gigantic flaming piece of shit.

His hands slowly release your wrists; they find purchase on your hips again and you _barely_ hold yourself back from copying the movement and dragging him back into you. “Yeah, no, I’m not kidding. I gotta stop.”

This must be what Kanaya was talking about when she mentioned humans Not Getting It. You let out a long, hard, annoyed sigh and bump your head back against the wall. “Can you at least tell me _why_?”

“Because we’re getting carried away is why.”

“So?” You don’t mean for it to sound like a bite but it kind of feels like one because the asshole is essentially abandoning you and your rusted-wheel hormones cold after the most intense build up you’ve ever had and it’s _really not fair_ , okay?

“What the hell do you mean, so?” He backs off a little, takes a step away from you. “I don’t… you know. I’m alright with dudes and all, I kinda don’t really give a shit about that sort of thing. But you gotta ease me into this, okay, because I’ve never actually gotten into it with a dude, even casually like this.” His lips quirk up a little. “Let alone a fuckin’ alien dude, come on man. Baby steps.”

Yeah, you understand. You get _exactly_ what he’s saying. But you’re also frustrated because you were pretty sure that you were just about _in_ a relationship with this prick a second ago even though he said ‘casually’ just now?

Oh.

This is also what Kanaya meant. About humans Not Getting It.

“…hold on, hold on, _casually_?” You feel your posture go rigid against the wall. “Did I hear that right?”

The small smirk disappears instantly. He shrugs a little. “…yeah? What did you think this was?”

You breathe out another sigh, this one exasperated. “Okay, obviously we’re stupid and we probably should have thought this out better.”

“We? Pretty sure you’re the one who came at me all crazy and hostile today.”

“And did you figure out ANYWHERE within the recesses of your genetically inferior brain _why_ I was so aggressive so spontaneously?”

Please have at least an inkling.

“Nope.”

_Shit_.

“Then why the hell did you go along with it??” you question him and your voice has risen at least two decibels with your frustration. Why the everloving fuck do you ALWAYS fall for the idiots?

“Dude I was raised on random-ass fights, it’s not like this was a new thing for me or anything.”

You flatten your palms back against the wall next to your legs to keep from punching him or taking him by the shoulders to shake him or digging your fingers back up over his scalp to drag his face back to yours, fuck, _what_ an asshole.

“And to be honest,” he tacks on. “I didn’t even think _you_ were, you know, gay or anything so this just keeps… throwing me off, I guess, you don’t seem the type being so aggressive and all.”

“What’s gay.”

“Ah, when a dude likes another dude. Or girl likes another girl, same word for both.”

“John said that’s what ‘homosexual’ is.”

“Same thing. We have a few terms for it, just some of them are more PC than others.”

“PC?” Why are you _bothering_? 

“Politically Correct, you know. Acceptable by society’s terms and definitions.”

He’s completely lost you. And you’re digressing, anyway.

You shake your head. “Alright, fine, whatever it is, no, ‘gay’ does not exist with my species. We find mates and that’s it. Gender notwithstanding.”

“…huh. That’s cool, actually.”

“Oh yeah, _pretty fucking fascinating_ , Dave, but before you run off to write your fucking novel about it can we please focus here, I feel like we’re at a point now where some things need to be made clear.”

“Sure, man, don’t have to get mad.”

“I do, actually!” Oops. Reel it in, Vantas. You inhale, long and exaggerated, through your nose. “…I do. Because YOU can have your gays and your PCs, that doesn’t concern me, but what DOES concern me is that MY culture has fucking quadrants and this _whole fucking shitstorm_ has essentially been ME making an apparently ASS out of myself trying to fucking court you into one. Okay? Is that clear? I’m _asking you out_ , Dave. Does that make ANY sense to you now?”

Both eyebrows are visible now, shooting up toward his hairline. “Oh. Oh. A’right, okay, now I see.”

“ _Finally_ ,” you grind out. 

“Okay. Okay, uhh.” He takes another step back. “I know basically why those quadrant things exist and sort of what they mean? But to be honest with you, dude, I’m… probably not what you’re looking for to fill one of them.”

You don’t want it to happen, but your hopes sink.

“What?”

“Yo, I’m cool with what we’ve been doing and stuff, like I said, that doesn’t freak me out or anything. Just…” He seems legitimately at a loss, and he’s not sure how else to phrase it to make you feel better. THAT makes you sick. You don’t want his sympathy. 

“I’m just not into that,” he finally gives up and says bluntly. “I don’t want to be one dude in what, three more that are involved in a _thing_ because for me, _things_ are like… person-on-person. One-on-one.”

You just keep staring at him because while you understand every word coming out of his mouth, you suddenly feel really, really agonizingly embarrassed. You made your move, it _really_ felt like it was working, and now he’s basically telling you that even if you were _actually flushed_ for him, it would never be reciprocated. Even if you were _actually flushed_ for him, this won’t go down the way you want it to.

Shit. _Shit_.

You let your next breath out slowly to settle yourself down, but the moment he asks you if you’re okay in a voice way more gentle than you’re expecting, you feel the lump lodge itself right back up into your fucking throat. You want to go down with honor, not an emotional breakdown. You calmly get your sickles back into your sylladex, push away from the wall, and shift around him to leave.

He catches your wrist. “Hey, wait, Karkat—“

You wrench yourself out of his hold. “Fuck off,” you bark back, and leave before he can see just how disappointed you actually are.

Gee.

Good thing you aren’t _actually flushed_ for him or anything.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s quiet, save for the constant humming white noise of the meteor and your own nervous breathing, so when you turn a corner and the sound comes again, sounding like it’s right fucking behind you, you almost shout. You actually have to _cover your mouth_ to keep from making a noise back. Your palms are clammy and your joints feel like they’re trembling.
> 
> It only takes two nervous half-steps backward to realize that it did come from behind you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter of this segment (year one) - this is turning into a full four-part series, to cover each year, so the second story will begin in a little bit as a continuation. It will be written from Dave's perspective.   
> As always, thanks a ton for the really nice comments and kudos on my first Homestuck work. I'm going to take a short break before I start posting the next segment but if anyone ever wants to reach me or slap me or flail at me or _whatever_ , I'm on Tumblr as "bbbbangarang". :)
> 
> * * *

It takes a long time but eventually you will yourself to sleep in the comforting numbness of your Recuperacoon. You don’t dream, not that you can remember at least, and that’s good because you didn’t want to. You can deal with arguments. You can deal with stupidity, though just barely. You have even pulled through the trauma of witnessing most of your friends being brutally murdered and disembodied by the friend whom you _still_ consider your closest. What you CAN’T seem to wrap your thick fucking stupid head around is rejection.

Rejection _sucks_.

It’s expected for a troll who’s reaching the middle of sexual maturity to float in and out of quadrants before finally settling seriously on them, but it’s one thing to still be sorting out your relationships, and it’s another thing for someone to flat-out tell you that they don’t want you directly to your face.

No, that’s wrong. He wants you. But just to fool around with. And that feels… that feels _weird_. 

You went to bed feeling incredibly let down.

Maybe an hour or so after drifting off, you are sharply and abruptly awakened by a familiar noise, just outside of the room’s door, that sets your pulse off and instantly makes your stomach turn.

His signals to you using his horn have always been so soft and quiet. He doesn’t want the attention of anyone else; it’s only _you_ he’s ever trying to contact and he doesn’t try to drag unnecessary attention to himself if he doesn’t have to.

Given that, the fact that this horn honk was so loud and so crystal clear probably to anyone else means that something isn’t right.

Still groggy but waking up quickly, you nearly trip over yourself as you dry off the remnants of slime that you still have left and drag your clothes on to head out into the pitch-black hallway. It’s quiet, save for the constant humming white noise of the meteor and your own nervous breathing, so when you turn a corner and the sound comes again, sounding like it’s right fucking behind you, you almost shout. You actually have to _cover your mouth_ to keep from making a noise back. Your palms are clammy and your joints feel like they’re trembling.

It only takes two nervous half-steps backward to realize that it did come from behind you.

Your realization comes a little too late.

You can’t shout when a spidery hand slides over your own to keep it firmly against your mouth. An arm winds itself around your midsection and you don’t struggle because you’re too fucking confused, your body is being pulled backward and into the dip of another hallway, a darker one, straying to the left of the one you’d just been in. Your breathing has quickened considerably but you can hear a gentle “Ssshhhh, sshhhhhh” near your temple and that is the only thing keeping you from flying off of the fucking handle in a panic.

The dragging ceases a good distance from the lip of the other hallway and you feel the arm around you tighten a little. “Sshhh, my brother,” a familiarly raspy voice hushes against the pointed shell of your ear and even though you’re expecting your panic to subside with your recognition, it only grows denser.

Something is wrong.

You manage to gently shift your mouth out from under the both of your hands. “Fucking _shit_ , Gamzee,” you hiss back at him. “What the hell are you doing??”

He ‘sshhh’s you again, removing his hand from over yours to stroke his fingers gently through the hair over your forehead. Such a gesture would typically comfort you, but not only is he _out_ of the vents but he’s also sneaking around in the middle of the fucking night and essentially abducting you into dark, abandoned hallways. 

“What’s going on?” you ask him more calmly, because snapping at him right now will not accomplish anything except potentially pissing him off. “Are you okay?”

He chuckles deeply, darkly, and it’s the worst fucking sound you’ve ever heard.

“I’m peachy motherfuckin’ keen, brother,” he replies, still stroking your hair, gently and lovingly. “But I gotta tell you my man, not too impressed with what I saw earlier.”

Your blood feels like it instantly freezes over.

“That shit was pretty intense, bro, am I right?”

How could you have done that in _the room with the most vents_. Why were you not even thinking a little.

“Gamz—“

His voice drops a little. “I fuckin’ care about you, Kar, stash that knowledge permanently in your think pan, you hear?”

“Gamzee, I know. I know you do, but what’s—“

“You don’t deserve pain.”

It’s spoken so clearly and so steadily that it almost doesn’t even sound like Gamzee at all.

“I’m not in any pain, I’m fine,” you claim.

He doesn’t believe you. “Shouldn’t be messin’ with a dude like that if he ain’t gonna lock you down.”

You know this. Shit, you know this better than he does. You want to be locked in with him so fucking badly that you _hate_ yourself for it, you _hate_ yourself for how desperate you feel about the whole stupid mess.

“It just doesn’t work that way with humans, it’s not a big deal. Just… relax.” It’s way easier for you to say that to him and not just yourself.

“Brother’s gotta do what a brother’s gotta do and if I catch him hurting you like that again…” He trails off. You _feel_ his smile against your ear and it raises goosebumps to the surface of your skin. 

You’re unnerved enough to take your chances and you carefully squirm around in his grasp. He lets you; you don’t make any moves indicating that you’re going to run off or anything. Even if you planned on that, where the fuck would you even go? He has access to everything save for your room through the ventilation system.

You turn until you’re face to face with him – it’s much easier talking him down from instability when you can meet his eyes or touch him somehow. His other arm joins its mate around your waist and your hands lift to his shoulders, rubbing them absently. “ _Shoosh_ ,” you whisper, maintaining eye contact. “Calm down, okay? You’re reading too far into this.

There’s a stutter in his creepily overprotective cadence. “He hurt your body and your feelings. I ain’t about that.”

You nod knowingly, keeping your movements slow and non-hostile. “I know,” you respond gently. Your rubbing hands move up closer to his neck and you can feel some of the tension in even just his hold on you melt away. “I courted and it didn’t work. I’m fine, he’s an ignorant human fuckwit and nobody can change that. That’s _all_ , okay?”

He watches you solemnly before bending down and brushing his lips across yours. It’s a platonic gesture and you’re fine with it. You even return it. Wouldn’t be the first time.

He rests his forehead to yours and gives your midsection a squeeze. “I’m keepin’ an eye on that motherfucker, Karkat. Won’t throw any fibs at you; ain’t down with the idea of you and him.”

Nothing more really needs to be said. It’s pretty safe to assume that if something happens for him to misconstrue as ‘hurting you’ again, you wouldn’t be surprised if murder was the first thing to cross his mind.

You’re wary, but you don’t want to point anything out right now. So, you agree with him, offer him a quiet, “Okay.” and that seems to be enough for him to release you and wordlessly slink back into darkness, disappearing into the shadows of the long hallway. As worried about him _and_ the problem he just presented as you are, you let him go. You have a lot of thinking to do on your own.

You don’t go back to sleep.

 

\- - -

 

You don’t know how long you’ve been turning the same shit around in your head over and over before you finally emerge from your room. It’s lighter now – more lights powered on mean more people are up and about – and though your ass is dragging from a lack of rest (or relaxation, no way you’re getting your fucking hands on any of that any time soon now) you know that you need to eat something before the lack of nutrition meets up with the lack of sleep and your body starts to react accordingly.

You slow your pace toward the common area as you pass by the room Dave claimed as his own. You almost stop to knock and invite him to come eat with you or whatever, just to extend a fucking olive branch his way. You _do_ sort of feel bad after the fact; it’s not up to him to figure your quadrant shit out for you. He’s a human for fuck’s sake. YOU certainly aren’t in a rush to learn all of their complicated shit, so why should you expect the same from him.

On the other hand, you’re not sure if you can see his face without knocking a few nubby teeth out of it right now. He didn't handle letting you down so well.

You decide to pass.

The pantry is empty and quiet and that’s exactly what you want. Even the Mayor isn’t around; probably around the corner working on the damn can town that Dave has mentioned (raved about) in passing a few times. And invited you to. But really, what the fuck, who actually wants to go to can town. Not you.

Not really.

You dig through the pantry and come up with a few cans of troll-friendly food (all you’ve been eating lately, because you’re extremely hesitant to trust the shit that humans shove into their smelly maws; what if you had some sort of crazy underlying allergy and no means to cure it if you had a reaction on a _goddamn meteor_?) – most of the stuff around here is painfully generic with its lack of flavour and preparation time, but it’s alright. Everyone seems to be getting used to what you all have.

You only grab enough for yourself, no trips to the vents today (don’t even think about the fact that he was prowling around in the hallways last night, don’t even think about it), and make a move to round the corner to head back to the secluded comfort of your respiteblock.

That’s when you collide with something kind of hard, kind of wiry, and kind of… fleshy.

Of course it’s Dave, because your life sucks and fortune has never been particularly kind to you. Probably having just woken up, himself, with his robes off and nothing but shorts and a _ridiculously_ loose-fitted tank top in their place.

He responds to the collision with merely a grunt whereas you nearly drop the cans in your arms and scramble to keep them in your grasp. Once recovered, you glance up at him, unwilling to let your eyes wander to the skin you haven’t seen up so close yet (human bodies are _very_ weird; similar to your species but littered with various marks that are just ‘built into’ or whatever the pigment) and instead, staring down those damnably blank glasses. 

He pauses for a beat, staring back, before he reaches out, takes the cans from you, and turns right the hell back around. “Appreciate it, bud,” he calls back, and the tension in the air is thankfully released.

“Strider!” you holler back, obviously following after him because you want your food back, damnit. “What the hell, when the fuck did you start even eating troll food, give that back.”

You can’t see his face but you _know_ he’s fucking smirking and you hate it because you’re still angry with him but his teasing hasn’t gotten any less charming and _wait, when the fuck_ did he change from irritating as anything to charming? You really need to check your priorities if you’re losing touch with your feelings THAT easily because it’s sort of bullshit that you haven’t been keeping your eye on them as closely as you should have been this whole time.

When he doesn’t listen to you or concede for long enough to give you your goddamn food back, you quicken your pace to catch up with him, trying to swipe around him to either steal the cans from him or even at the very least knock them out of his hands. Damn his reflexes because he doesn’t allow you to do either – he just twists his body to the side a little to dodge you. You’ve been raised to be persistent, even if it means coming off as an irritant, and you only try harder. He only stops walking because you’ve pushed your entire body in front of his path and he’s forced to lift the food as high up into the air as he can to avoid your grabbing claws.

Which is not fair. Because you’re shorter than he is.

“What the fuck, you fucking shitnozzle,” you mutter as you actually make a jump for it and it only takes one small shift on his part to evade you.

“I’ll give ‘em back to you,” he drawls coolly. “if you hear me out for a sec.”

You stop reaching and sigh, hands falling irritably to your sides. “How did I fucking guess there was a catch to this.”

“You gotta agree first.”

You glower at him. “Fine, what.”

He keeps the cans above him; wise decision because you’re not in the mood to hash any fucking feelings out with him right now and any opportunity you would have to cut it short by stealing your food back, you’d take easily. He’s on to you.

“First, I’m sorry.” You weren’t expecting that, and you feel your shoulders droop a little. You can only imagine what your expression just did, because he raises his eyebrows in a way that holds up a proverbial finger and says ‘hold on, let me finish’. “Yesterday was weird, we kinda left off in a bad place and I’m sorry about it, okay? I feel like a lot of that was my fault.”

“A lot of it, he says,” you scoff quietly.

His mouth shuts and he stares you down. Now his demeanor says ‘can I finish?’ – he seems to be big on the pantomimes today.

You impatiently gesture for him to keep going.

“I guess I thought maybe you were just looking for the same thing I was, and I was confused. Sorry if…” The tension in his still-upreached arms loosens; his hold slacks a little. “…sorry if I wasn’t on the same page. If I knew you were getting so serious about it I would’ve talked to you about it sooner instead of letting shit escalate, you know?”

At _least_ he’s letting you down a lot more gently this time. That doesn’t take the sting away, though, and you almost offer the clipped, bitter response that’s sitting in wait on the tip of your tongue instinctually, but your gaze falls on one of the higher vents in the wall just over Dave’s shoulder and you freeze.

_He could be in there right now._

The thought alone sends a tremor down your spine and you forcefully neutralize your expression. You’re certainly disappointed with this entire situation and you would _really_ like to be honest and tell Dave your side of the story, let him know exactly what your stance is on it, but Gamzee’s threats from the night before did not fall on deaf ears. You know better, way better, than to let anything he says dismissively fall by the wayside because you have seen him carry out the act that he is threatening against Dave, and you’ve seen him do it like an expert assassin would. He doesn’t fight when murder is his intention. He finds the quickest way to get his job done, and he does it. You have a sick feeling that not even Dave’s speed could keep someone as unhinged as your moirail is from carrying out a kill that he is dead-set on. Pun not intended, there.

Instead of giving in to what you want to do, you stiffen your stance and raise your chin a little. Confidence, Karkat. You can fool Gamzee because he trusts you. “Okay. Apology accepted.”

Dave apparently hadn’t been expecting you to cave so quickly, because there’s another moment of silent staring. You’re starting to hate when he does that. His arms lower completely now; neither of you are focused on the food anymore. “For real?”

“Yes. For real. We’ll move on from it.” You extend your hands for the cans of food to dissuade anymore prolonged stretches of awkward silence.

He starts to lift his own hands again, but hesitates. “So, uh… no more hanky panky, I’m guessing.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean.”

“Making out,” he clarifies.

“Ah. No. I don’t do that unless I’m looking for a quadrant-mate, so it’s off the table now. Agreed?” Gigantic lie, there, but he doesn’t need to know that. That’s sort of the way it SHOULD be, you guess, but there are only so many excuses you can make to discourage his hands and his lips from tempting you into deeper feelings. If he’s as against being involved in a quadrant relationship as he claims to be, that should be enough to keep him at bay so you can work at distancing yourself, as well. Not just for your own sake, but for his, as well. Any faux pas on his end could be a danger to him at this point.

Better safe than sorry. Or whatever.

You follow up by raising your eyebrows expectantly and beckoning with crooked fingers.

He gets the hint and slowly places the cans of food into both of your hands. “Agreed.”

You allow your fingers to brush his in the process.

It’s the last intimate gesture you allow yourself to make for a long time.


End file.
